Translational Bioinformatics: Challenges and Opportunities forCase-Based Reasoning and Decision Support

Translational bioinformatics is bioinformatics applied to human health. Although, up to now, its main focus has been to support molecular medicine research, translational bioinformatics has now the opportunity to design clinical decision support systems based on the combination of -omics data and internet-based knowledge resources. The paper describes the state-of-art of translational bioinformatics highlighting challenges and opportunities for decision support tools and case-based reasoning. It finally reports the design of a new system for supporting diagnosis in dilated cardiomyopathy. The system is able to combine text mining, literature search and case-based retrieval.