Precision Medicine Informatics: Principles, Prospects, and Challenges

Precision medicine (PM) is an emerging approach that appears with the impression of changing the existing paradigm of medical practice. Recent advances in technological innovations and genetics and the growing availability of health data have set a new pace of the research and impose a set of new requirements on the different stakeholders. Some studies are available that discuss about the different aspects of PM. Nevertheless, a holistic representation of those aspects deemed to confer with the technological perspective, in relation to the applications and challenges, have been mostly ignored. In this context, this paper surveys the advances in PM from the informatics viewpoint and reviews the enabling tools and techniques in a categorized manner. In addition, the study discusses how other technological paradigms, which include big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things, can be exploited to advance the potentials of PM. Furthermore, the paper provides some guidelines for future research for a seamless implementation and a wide-scale deployment of PM based on the identified open issues and the associated challenges. As a result, the paper proposes an integrated holistic framework for PM motivating informatics researchers to design their relevant research work in an appropriate context.