Technologies in medical information processing

Providing healthcare is a multidisciplinary effort where Information plays a lifesaving role. Advances in health technologies have diversified the sources of information that can be analyzed and used for correct diagnostics and decision-making. Researchers and system developers in the field of telemedicine are consciously inventing and improving data generation, collection, and processing methods with a view to improving the quality of care and possibly reduce cost and effort need in providing care. Bringing newly developed technologies specific to information processing to the attention of healthcare providers (individuals or healthcare institutes) is vitally important to improve the quality of care. With this in mind, in this chapter the authors explain the importance of a number of health indicators that can be measured for data collection purposes such as temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate. This chapter also presents several latest technologies that capture data and process it to produce meaningful and visual information that can be used for diagnostics and treatment purposes such as X-ray, computerized tomography (CT) scan, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. The chapter highlights the importance of data mining techniques in retrieving the required information from an information-pool in providing the right healthcare. The authors emphasize the fact that retrieving the required information may not be enough to provide the right healthcare service since the retrieved information needs to be interpreted by healthcare professionals to resolve a healthcare case.