Preface to Biological Data Mining and its Applications in Healthcare

Scientists in biology and healthcare are facing an unprecedented growth of biological and clinical data such as genetic sequences, DNA micro arrays, bimolecular interactions and pathways, bio-images, patient records, and research papers. The new-found ease of generating large amounts of biological and clinical data has made the timely analysis of the data generated an uphill task. In addition, to translate genomic research from bench to bedside, meaningful observations and discoveries will have to be drawn from a wide array of diverse data with high degrees of data heterogeneity and hierarchy, spanning from molecular biology to pharmaceutical and clinical domains.