Medical Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

Book excerpt: Modern medicine generates, almost daily, huge amounts of heterogeneous data. For example, medical data may contain SPECT images, signals like ECG, clinical information like temperature, cholesterol levels, etc., as well as the physician's interpretation. Those who deal with such data understand that there is a widening gap between data collection and data comprehension. Computerized techniques are needed to help humans address this problem. This volume is devoted to the relatively young and growing field of medical data mining and knowledge discovery. As more and more medical procedures employ imaging as a preferred diagnostic tool, there is a need to develop methods for efficient mining in databases of images. Other significant features are security and confidentiality concerns. Moreover, the physician's interpretation of images, signals, or other technical data, is written in unstructured English which is very difficult to mine. This book addresses all these specific features.