Introduction to the special section on clinical data mining

Mining clinical data is a fast-evolving field, ranging from mining patient data of a particular type (e.g., images, genomics) to mining the increased amount of mixed-format information (databases, free text, images, labs, etc) in electronic health records (EHR), to selecting, extracting and synthesizing relevant knowledge from large medical corpuses, to the promise of personalized medicine where therapy and prevention are tailored to smaller and smaller patient subpopulations, down to the individual patient. Clinical data mining can be a key asset in driving vast systemic improvements in healthcare, leading to improved patient outcomes and reduced healthcare costs. In this report we briefly survey the latest advancements in this field, and introduce four selected articles that cover both state-of-the-art data mining techniques for clinical data and discuss emerging clinical data mining applications.