Imaging informatics has emerged as a major research theme in biomedicine in the last few decades. Currently, personalised, predictive and preventive patient care is believed to be one of the top priorities in biomedical research and practice. Imaging informatics plays a major role in biomedicine studies. This paper reviews main applications and challenges of imaging informatics in biomedicine.

BACKGROUND The idea of personalised medicine (PM) has gathered momentum recently, attracting funding and generating hopes as well as scepticism. As PM gives rise to differing interpretations, there have been several attempts to clarify the concept. In an influential paper published in this journal, Schleidgen and colleagues have proposed a precise and narrow definition of PM on the basis of a s...

Driven by the growing demand of personalization of medical procedures, data-based, computer-aided cancer research in human patients is advancing at an accelerating pace, providing a broadening landscape of opportunity for Machine Learning methods. This landscape can be observed from the wide-reaching view of population studies down to the genotype detail. In this brief paper, we provide a sweep...

The promise of personalised medicine is now a clinical reality, with colorectal cancer genetics at the forefront of this next major advance in clinical medicine. This is no more evident than in the recent advances in testing of colorectal cancers for specific molecular alterations in order to guide treatment with the monoclonal antibody therapies cetuximab and panitumumab, which target the epid...

BACKGROUND This paper is the first in a series of invited perspectives by pioneers of nuclear medicine imaging and physics. A medical physicist and a nuclear medicine physician each take a backward and a forward look at the contributions of physics to nuclear medicine. Here, we provide a forward look from the medical physicist's perspective. DISCUSSION The author examines a number of developm...

Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, the Division of Preventive Medicine, JUPITER Trial Coordinating Center, Division of Genetics, Division of Cardiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA; Helmholtz Zentrum München, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Research Unit of Molecular Epidemiology, Neuherberg, Germany; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s & Boston ...

Dietary and nutritional therapies encompass preventive and educational approaches to diet and lifestyle changes, in order to promote and optimise physical and mental health. They encompass personalised dietary therapy and nutraceutical prescription, and lifestyle advice within a functional medicine framework. This represents a nutritional paradigm different to that which underpins current diete...

Clinical benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), often identified as a worsening ability of a male to pass urine, is a significant problem for men in our society. In 2015, the use of personalised medicine is tailoring treatment to individual patient needs and to genetic characteristics. Technological advances in surgical treatment are changing the way BPH is treated and are resulting in less morbid...

The paper discusses how information based medicine has become an increasingly important model of healthcare. Today's patients are better informed and therefore play a more active role in their own healthcare, fuelling the drive towards personalized medicine. Information Based Medicine enables researchers to design targeted therapeutics and rapidly develop best practices guidelines to enable hea...