This article is part of the supplement: Italian Society of Bioinformatics (BITS): Annual Meeting 2006
Research
SYMBIOmatics: Synergies in Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics – exploring current scientific literature for emerging topics
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* Corresponding author: Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhman rebholz@ebi.ac.uk
1 EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK
2 Erasmus University Medical Center, Postbus 1738, 3000 DR, Netherlands
3 Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), Rennes, France
4 Ministry of Education and Science, Paseo de la Castellana 160, Madrid, Spain
5 Institute of Health "Carlos III", Carretera Majadahonda a Pozuelo Km. 2, 28220 Majadahonda (Madrid), Spain
6 Institute for Biomedical Technologies (CNR-ITB), Via Fratelli Cervi 93, 20090 Segrate (MI), Italy
7 National Research Council (CNR), Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5-00185 Roma, Italy
8 Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Institute of Computer Science, P.O. Box 1385, GR-711 10 Heraklion, Crete, Greece
BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8(Suppl 1):S18 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-S1-S18
Published: 8 March 2007Abstract
Background
The SYMBIOmatics Specific Support Action (SSA) is "an information gathering and dissemination activity" that seeks "to identify synergies between the bioinformatics and the medical informatics" domain to improve collaborative progress between both domains (ref. to http://www.symbiomatics.org webcite). As part of the project experts in both research fields will be identified and approached through a survey. To provide input to the survey, the scientific literature was analysed to extract topics relevant to both medical informatics and bioinformatics.
Results
This paper presents results of a systematic analysis of the scientific literature from medical informatics research and bioinformatics research. In the analysis pairs of words (bigrams) from the leading bioinformatics and medical informatics journals have been used as indication of existing and emerging technologies and topics over the period 2000–2005 ("recent") and 1990–1990 ("past"). We identified emerging topics that were equally important to bioinformatics and medical informatics in recent years such as microarray experiments, ontologies, open source, text mining and support vector machines. Emerging topics that evolved only in bioinformatics were system biology, protein interaction networks and statistical methods for microarray analyses, whereas emerging topics in medical informatics were grid technology and tissue microarrays.
Conclusion
We conclude that although both fields have their own specific domains of interest, they share common technological developments that tend to be initiated by new developments in biotechnology and computer science.