From Data to Knowledge: An Introduction to Biomedical Informatics

The field of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) is concerned with multimethod approaches to generating contextualized information and actionable knowledge from a variety of biological and healthcare-relevant data types. In doing so, BMI practitioners adopt and adapt a number of methods drawn from the computational, quantitative, and qualitative sciences. In this chapter, we provide an overview of such methods and a rationale for how they can be applied to address driving biological and clinical problems. Such use cases span a range from the biomolecular characterization of disease states to the comprehensive phenotyping of patients to the promotion of population health. In doing so, we hope to equip readers with the ability to critically understand and evaluate the use of multimethod approaches as are commonly encountered in the aforementioned application areas.