Landscape of Big Medical Data: A Pragmatic Survey on Prioritized Tasks

Abstract

Big medical data pose great challenges to life scientists, clinicians, computer scientists, and engineers. In this paper, a group of life scientists, clinicians, computer scientists, and engineers sit together to discuss several fundamental issues. First, what are the unique characteristics of big medical data different from those of the other domains? Second, what are the prioritized tasks in clinician research and practices utilizing big medical data? And do we have enough publicly available data sets for performing those tasks? Third, do the state-of-the-practice and state-of-the-art algorithms perform good jobs? Fourth, are there any benchmarks for measuring algorithms and systems for big medical data? Fifth, what are the performance gaps of the state-of-the-practice and state-of-the-art systems handling big medical data currently or in the future? Finally, but not least, are we, life scientists, clinicians, computer scientists, and engineers, ready for working together? We believe that answering the above-mentioned issues will help define and shape the landscape of big medical data.

Keywords

• Big medical data
• quantified self
• disease classification
• disease diagnosis
• drug discovery
• publicly available data