On Contributing to the Progress of Medical Informatics as Publisher.

May 1st, 2017, will mark Dieter Bergemann's 80th birthday. As Chief Executive Officer and Owner of Schattauer Publishers from 1983 to 2016, the biomedical and health informatics community owes him a great debt of gratitude. The past and present editors of Methods of Information in Medicine, the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, and Applied Clinical Informatics want to honour and thank Dieter Bergemann by providing a brief biography that emphasizes his contributions, by reviewing his critical role as an exceptionally supportive publisher for Schattauer's three biomedical and health informatics periodicals, and by sharing some personal anecdotes. Over the past 40 years, Dieter Bergemann has been an influential, if behind-the-scenes, driving force in biomedical and health informatics publications, helping to ensure success in the dissemination of our field's research and practice.

The IMIA History Working Group: Inception through the IMIA History Taskforce, and Major Events Leading Up to the 50th Anniversary of IMIA.

Background: The 50th Anniversary of IMIA will be celebrated in 2017 at the World Congress of Medical Informatics in China. This takes place 50 years after the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) Societies approved the formation of a new Technical Committee (TC) 4 on Medical Information Processing, which was the predecessor of IMIA, under the leadership of Dr. Francois Grémy. The IMIA History Working Group (WG) was approved in 2014 to document and write about the history of the field and its organizations. Objectives: The goals of this paper are to describe how the IMIA History WG arose and developed, including its meetings and projects, leading to the forthcoming 50th Anniversary of IMIA. Methods: We give a chronology of major developments leading up to the current work of the IMIA History WG and how it has stimulated writing on the international history of biomedical and health informatics, sponsoring the systematic compilation and writing of articles and stories from pioneers and leaders in the field, and the organization of workshops and panels over the past six years, leading towards the publication of the contributed volume on the 50th IMIA Anniversary History as an eBook by IOS Press. Conclusions: This article leads up to the IMIA History eBook which will contain original autobiographical retrospectives by pioneers and leaders in the field, together with professional organizational histories of the national and regional societies and working groups of IMIA, with commentary on the main themes and topics which have evolved as scientific and clinical practices have changed under the influence of new insights, technologies, and the changing socio-economic, cultural and professional circumstances around the globe over the past 50 years.

Historical Roots of International Biomedical and Health Informatics: The Road to IFIP-TC4 and IMIA through Cybernetic Medicine and the Elsinore Meetings.

Background: It is 50 years since the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) Societies approved the formation of a new Technical Committee (TC) 4 on Medical Information Processing under the leadership of Professor Francois Grémy, which was the direct precursor of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). Objectives: The goals of this paper are to give a very brief overview of early international developments leading to informatics in medicine, with the origins of the applications of computers to medicine in the USA and Europe, and two meetings - of the International Society of Cybernetic Medicine, and the Elsinore Meetings on Hospital Information Systems-that took place in 1966. These set the stage for the formation of IFIP-TC4 the following year, with later sponsorship of the first MEDINFO in 1974, setting the path for the evolution to IMIA. Methods: This paper reviews and analyzes some of the earliest research and publications, together with two critical contrasting meetings in 1966 involving international activities in what evolved into biomedical and health informatics in terms of their probable influence on the formation of IFIP-TC4. Conclusion: The formation of IFIP-TC 4 in 1967 by Francois Grémy arose out of his concerns for merging, at an international level, the diverse strands from the more abstract work on cybernetic medicine and its basis in biophysical and neural modeling, with the more concrete and health-oriented medical information processing that was developing at the time for hospitals and clinical decision-making.

An Opening Chapter of the First Generation of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: The First Rutgers AIM Workshop, June 1975.

The first generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medicine methods were developed in the early 1970's drawing on insights about problem solving in AI. They developed new ways of representing structured expert knowledge about clinical and biomedical problems using causal, taxonomic, associational, rule, and frame-based models. By 1975, several prototype systems had been developed and clinically tested, and the Rutgers Research Resource on Computers in Biomedicine hosted the first in a series of workshops on AI in Medicine that helped researchers and clinicians share their ideas, demonstrate their models, and comment on the prospects for the field. These developments and the workshops themselves benefited considerably from Stanford's SUMEX-AIM pioneering experiment in biomedical computer networking. This paper focuses on discussions about issues at the intersection of medicine and artificial intelligence that took place during the presentations and panels at the First Rutgers AIM Workshop in New Brunswick, New Jersey from June 14 to 17, 1975.

Discussion of "Biomedical informatics: we are what we publish".

This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine about the paper "Biomedical Informatics: We Are What We Publish", written by Peter L. Elkin, Steven H. Brown, and Graham Wright. It is introduced by an editorial. This article contains the combined commentaries invited to independently comment on the Elkin et al. paper. In subsequent issues the discussion can continue through letters to the editor.

Nanoinformatics: developing new computing applications for nanomedicine.

Nanoinformatics has recently emerged to address the need of computing applications at the nano level. In this regard, the authors have participated in various initiatives to identify its concepts, foundations and challenges. While nanomaterials open up the possibility for developing new devices in many industrial and scientific areas, they also offer breakthrough perspectives for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In this paper, we analyze the different aspects of nanoinformatics and suggest five research topics to help catalyze new research and development in the area, particularly focused on nanomedicine. We also encompass the use of informatics to further the biological and clinical applications of basic research in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and the related concept of an extended "nanotype" to coalesce information related to nanoparticles. We suggest how nanoinformatics could accelerate developments in nanomedicine, similarly to what happened with the Human Genome and other -omics projects, on issues like exchanging modeling and simulation methods and tools, linking toxicity information to clinical and personal databases or developing new approaches for scientific ontologies, among many others.

Personal health informatics. Editorial.

OBJECTIVES: To provide an editorial introduction to the 2012 IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics with an overview of its contents and contributors. METHODS: A brief overview of the main theme, and an outline of the purposes, contents, format, and acknowledgment of contributions for the 2012 IMIA Yearbook. RESULTS: This 2012 issue of the IMIA Yearbook highlights important developments in personal health informatics, impacting the activities in research, education and practice in this interdisciplinary field. There has been steady progress towards introducing individualization or personalization into informatics systems by taking advantage of the increasing amounts of personal information that is relevant to medical decisions and application in clinical practice. At the same time, there are serious issues about the limits of existing systems being able to effectively personalize information within both practical and ethical constraints so critical to the practice of medicine. Recent literature bearing on these questions includes the selected papers published during the past 12 months, and articles reported by IMIA Working Groups on these topics. CONCLUSION: Surveys of the main research sub-fields in biomedical informatics in the Yearbook provide an overview of progress and current challenges across the spectrum of the discipline, focusing on the challenges and opportunities involved in personal health informatics.

Biomedical informatics publications: a global perspective. Part II: Journals.

BACKGROUND: Biomedical Informatics (BMI) is a broad discipline, having evolved from both Medical Informatics (MI) and Bioinformatics (BI). An analysis of publications in the fieldshould provide an indication about the geographic distribution of BMI research contributions and possible lessons for the future, both for research and professional practice. OBJECTIVES: In part I of our analysis of biomedical informatics publications we presented results from BMI conferences. In this second part, we analyse BMI journals, which provide a broader perspective and comparison between data from conferences and journals that ought to confirm or suggest alternatives to the original distributional findings from the conferences. METHODS: We manually collected data about authors and their geographical origin from various MI journals: the International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI), the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), Methods of In formation in Medicine (MIM) and The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). Focusing on first authors, we also compared these findings with data from the journal Bioinformatics. RESULTS: Our results confirm those obtained in our analysis of BMI conferences - that local and regional authors favor their corresponding MI journals just as they do their conferences. Consideration of other factors, such as the increasingly open source nature of data and software tools, is consistent with these findings. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis suggests various indicators that could lead to further, deeper analyses, and could provide additional insights for future BMI research and professional activities.

Biomedical informatics publications: a global perspective: part I: conferences.

BACKGROUND: In the past decade, Medical Informatics (MI) and Bioinformatics (BI) have converged towards a new discipline, called Biomedical Informatics (BMI) bridging informatics methods across the spectrum from genomic research to personalized medicine and global healthcare. This convergence still raises challenging research questions which are being addressed by researchers internationally, which in turn raises the question of how biomedical informatics publications reflect the contributions from around the world in documenting the research. OBJECTIVES: To analyse the worldwide participation of biomedical informatics researchers from professional groups and societies in the best-known scientific conferences in the field. The analysis is focused on their geographical affiliation, but also includes other features, such as the impact and recognition of the conferences. METHODS: We manually collected data about authors of papers presented at three major MI conferences: Medinfo, MIE and the AMIA symposium. In addition, we collected data from a BI conference, ISMB, as a comparison. Finally, we analyzed the impact and recognition of these conferences within their scientific contexts. RESULTS: Data indicate a predominance of local authors at the regional conferences (AMIA and MIE), whereas other conferences with a world-wide scope (Medinfo and ISMB) had broader participation. Our analysis shows that the influence of these conferences beyond the discipline remains somewhat limited. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that for BMI to be recognized as a broad discipline, both in the geographical and scientific sense, it will need to extend the scope of collaborations and their interdisciplinary impacts worldwide.

Confluence of disciplines in health informatics: an international perspective.

OBJECTIVE: To discuss international aspects as they relate to the convergence of disciplines in health informatics. METHOD: A group of international experts was invited at a symposium to present and discuss their perspectives on this topic. These have been collated in a single manuscript. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Significant challenges, as well as opportunities, appear when cumulating the intrinsic multidisciplinary nature of health informatics interventions with the diversity of contexts at the global level, in particular when considered in the perspective of a confluence, i.e., the mixing of different waters and their merging into a new, stronger entity. Health informatics experts reflect on key issues such as collaborative software development and distributed knowledge sourcing, social media and mobile technologies, the evolutions of the discipline from an historical perspective, as well as examples of challenges for implementing ubiquitous healthcare or for supporting disaster situations when infrastructures get disrupted.

Biomedical ontologies: toward scientific debate.

OBJECTIVES: Biomedical ontologies have been very successful in structuring knowledge for many different applications, receiving widespread praise for their utility and potential. Yet, the role of computational ontologies in scientific research, as opposed to knowledge management applications, has not been extensively discussed. We aim to stimulate further discussion on the advantages and challenges presented by biomedical ontologies from a scientific perspective. METHODS: We review various aspects of biomedical ontologies going beyond their practical successes, and focus on some key scientific questions in two ways. First, we analyze and discuss current approaches to improve biomedical ontologies that are based largely on classical, Aristotelian ontological models of reality. Second, we raise various open questions about biomedical ontologies that require further research, analyzing in more detail those related to visual reasoning and spatial ontologies. RESULTS: We outline significant scientific issues that biomedical ontologies should consider, beyond current efforts of building practical consensus between them. For spatial ontologies, we suggest an approach for building "morphospatial" taxonomies, as an example that could stimulate research on fundamental open issues for biomedical ontologies. CONCLUSIONS: Analysis of a large number of problems with biomedical ontologies suggests that the field is very much open to alternative interpretations of current work, and in need of scientific debate and discussion that can lead to new ideas and research directions.

International efforts in nanoinformatics research applied to nanomedicine.

BACKGROUND: Nanomedicine and nanoinformatics are novel disciplines facing substantial challenges. Since nanomedicine involves complex and massive data analysis and management, a new discipline named nanoinformatics is now emerging to provide the vision and the informatics methods and tools needed for such purposes. Methods from biomedi-cal informatics may prove applicable with some adaptation despite nanomedicine involving different biophysical and biochemical characteristics of nanomaterials and corresponding differences in information complexity. OBJECTIVES: We analyze recent initiatives and opportunities for research in nanomedicine and nanoinformatics as well as the previous experience of the authors, particularly in the context of a European project named ACTION-Grid. In this project the authors aimed to create a collaborative environment in biomedical and nanomedical research among countries in Europe, Western Balkans, Latin America, North Africa and the USA. METHODS: We review and analyze the rationale and scientific issues behind the new fields of nanomedicine and nanoinformatics. Such a review is linked to actual research projects and achievements of the authors within their groups. RESULTS: The work of the authors at the intersection between these two areas is presented. We also analyze several research initiatives that have recently emerged in the EU and USA context and highlight some ideas for future action at the international level. CONCLUSIONS: Nanoinformatics aims to build new bridges between medicine, nanotechnology and informatics, allowing the application of computational methods in the nano-related areas. Opportunities for world-wide collaboration are already emerging and will be influential in advancing the field.

Closing the loops in biomedical informatics.

OBJECTIVES: To provide an editorial introduction to the 2009 IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics with an overview of its contents and contributors. METHODS: A brief overview of the main theme, and an outline of the purposes, contents, format, and acknowledgment of contributions for the 2009 IMIA Yearbook. RESULTS: This 2009 issue of the IMIA Yearbook highlights important, beneficial loops which, if closed, could lead to considerable advances in the field of biomedical informatics and, indirectly, in healthcare and biomedical research. Progress towards closing the loops and remaining gaps are identified from the recent literature, illustrated by selected papers published during the past 12 months. CONCLUSION: Reviews and Surveys of the main research sub-fields in biomedical informatics in the Yearbook provide an overview of progress and current challenges across the spectrum of the discipline.

From ambient assisted living to global information management: IMIA-referencing publications in 2008.

OBJECTIVE: To give an overview of publications directly referencing the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) in 2008. METHOD: Systematic search for references to IMIA over the two official IMIA journals, and reports of the recent IMIA General Assembly and Board meetings, using PubMed/Medline, supplemented by searches with Google Scholar and Google Books. RESULTS: Beyond the IMIA Yearbook 2008, 38 IMIA-referencing publications were found by these searches, encompassing a broad range of topics, ranging from ambient assisted living technologies in home environments to global information management methodologies. CONCLUSIONS: In 2008 IMIA-referencing publications found through both medical and general search engines were predominantly in journals. In years where IMIA's world congress on medical informatics, Medinfo take place, it could be expected that the Medinfo proceedings will also play an important role in referencing IMIA explicitly.

Biomedical and health informatics in translational medicine.

OBJECTIVES: To discuss translational medicine advances challenging biomedical and health informatics. METHODS: Reviewing material presented at the Heidelberg 35th Anniversary Workshop, summarizing results from the 1st AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics and discussing the opportunities, difficulties, and ethical dilemmas confronting researchers, practitioners, and healthcare managers in transitional bioinformatics. RESULTS: The first results in translational medicine are appearing in the biomedical literature. All rely on bioinformatics methods for analysis. CONCLUSIONS: Translational medicine introduces new problems of interpretation and application to healthcare. Applying results to complex human-machine systems raises ethical issues, which are augmented in healthcare informatics. Bridging biological, medical, and informatics knowledge requires new epistemological approaches.

Introducing Kuhn et al.'s paper "Informatics and medicine: from molecules to populations" and invited papers on this special topic.

OBJECTIVE: To introduce the paper by Kuhn et al. "Informatics and Medicine: From Molecules to Populations" and the papers that follow on this special topic in this issue of Methods of Information in Medicine, which opens a debate on the Kuhn et al. paper's assertions by an international panel of invited researchers in biomedical informatics. METHOD: An introductory summary and comparative review of the Kuhn et al. paper and the debate papers, with some personal observations. RESULTS: The Kuhn et al. paper makes a strong case for interdisciplinary education in biomedical informatics across institutions at the graduate level, which could be strengthened by analysis of previous relevant interdisciplinary experiences elsewhere, and the challenges they have faced, which point to more pervasive and earlier-stage needs for both education and practice bridging the research and healthcare communities. CONCLUSIONS: The experts debating the Kuhn et al. paper strongly and broadly support the key recommendation of developing graduate education in biomedical informatics in a more comprehensive way, yet at the same time make some incisive comments about the limitations of the "positivistic" and excessively technological orientation of the paper, which could benefit from greater attention to the narrative and care-giving aspects of health practice, with more emphasis on its human and social aspects.

Access to health information. Editorial.

OBJECTIVES: To provide an editorial introduction to the 2008 IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics with an overview of its contents and contributors. METHODS: A brief overview of the main theme of "Access to Health Information", and an outline of the purposes, contents, format, and acknowledgment of contributions for the 2008 IMIA Yearbook. RESULTS: This 2008 issue of the IMIA Yearbook highlights how Access to Health Information has become ubiquitous over the web during the past decade, with a significant number of publications in biomedical and health informatics addressing both the science and technology of the field and how it is contributing to the improvement of health systems worldwide through a number of original contributions, and selected excellent papers published during the past 12 months. CONCLUSION: The reviews and surveys on the main research fields in medical informatics in the Yearbook provide an overview of progress during this fortieth year of IMIA, focusing on the critical role that informatics plays in access to health information.