Bioinformatics: a helpmate in the endoscopic age

Excerpt

I had the opportunity of attending an introductory session devoted to bioinformatics at one of our local universities. The concept is that the university would establish a bioinformatics center and use the expertise of clinicians at our hospital to assure that the information collected would be relevant to patient care or medical research. This certainly was an eye-opening experience for me since it dealt with the “grassroots” concepts of an exciting new field that is foreign to most clinicians. The concept of bioinformatics relates to the collection of information from large datasets which, in turn, allows for the sorting and cataloging of these materials. One of the current examples of this type of collective material is in the micro array technology dealing with genomics. This technology is utilized primarily in the genetic understanding of cancer and metabolic diseases. The key to the utilization of bioinformatics is to comprehend the variety of ways this tool can possibly relate to areas of clinical care. …