Functional informatics and personalised medicine are key synergistic components of translational medicine

Abstract

Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of United States of American and the International Society of Intelligent Biological Medicine (ISIBM), the IEEE 7th Bioinformatics and Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School was the only IEEE international conference designed dynamically in response to the cutting edge research and education in translational bioinformatics and bioengineering. The Harvard event contains a number of research workshops such as the workshop on Nano-Bio-Info Integration for Personalised Medicine organised by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, the workshop on progress toward petascale applications organised by Indiana University and Georgia Tech and the research workshop organised by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy and the Southern Illinois University. The Harvard event focused on special topics to resonate its theme: Functional informatics and personalised medicine are key synergistic components of translational medicine. It also fostered the collaboration and interaction between the functional informatics and personalised domains. The academic event attracted more than 500 scientists, researchers and medical doctors world-wide to present, discuss and exchange their research during 14-17 October, 2007 at Harvard Medical School. This special issue contains peer-reviewed full-length research papers focusing on modern translational medicine and treatment technique varying from molecular aspects to telemedicine, medical imaging and clinical applications. Those papers were originated from presentations and competitions for the research awards at Harvard. Authors were invited to expand their presentations into full research papers with significant additional scientific details. All papers were rigorously reviewed by at least three professors from the 273 members of scientific review and program committee. Those papers represent important original scientific contributions to the modern healthcare fields. More information regarding the Harvard event can be found at the White Paper of the IEEE 7th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School Conference at BMC Genomics http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/9/S2/I1