An object relational approach to biomedical database

Abstract

As neuroscience research advances, there is an increasing need to integrate data from a single patient who has undergone multiple levels of analysis. In a biomedical application (such as an Alzheimer's clinic), a patient might have medical data, MRI data, cognitive data and autopsy data all collected at various times. This paper introduces "BioCompose", an object-relational database system that integrates clinical, neuropathological and image data sets into a uniform framework with a simple user interface. It addresses the advantages of taking an object-relational approach for a large and complex application.