Methods in Medical Informatics

A guide for applying basic informatics algorithms to medical data sets. It includes examples using three most common programming languages (Perl, Python, and Ruby). It provides basic methods for retrieving, organizing, merging, and analyzing their data sources. It covers building blocks, primary tasks of medical informatics, and medical discovery.
Too often, healthcare workers are led to believe that medical informatics is a complex field that can only be mastered by teams of professional programmers. This is simply not the case. With just a few dozen simple algorithms, easily implemented with open source programming languages, you can fully utilize the medical information contained in clinical and research datasets. The common computational tasks of medical informatics are accessible to anyone willing to learn the basics.

Methods in Medical Informatics: Fundamentals of Healthcare Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby demonstrates that biomedical professionals with fundamental programming knowledge can master any kind of data collection. Providing you with access to data, nomenclatures, and programming scripts and languages that are all free and publicly available, this book -

Describes the structure of data sources used, with instructions for downloading
Includes a clearly written explanation of each algorithm
Offers equivalent scripts in Perl, Python, and Ruby, for each algorithm
Shows how to write short, quickly learned scripts, using a minimal selection of commands
Teaches basic informatics methods for retrieving, organizing, merging, and analyzing data sources
Provides case studies that detail the kinds of questions that biomedical scientists can ask and answer with public data and an open source programming language

Requiring no more than a working knowledge of Perl, Python, or Ruby, Methods in Medical Informatics will have you writing powerful programs in just a few minutes. Within its chapters, you will find descriptions of the basic methods and implementations needed to complete many of the projects you will encounter in your biomedical career.