Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Course Description

Biology and medicine are moving into a new era that is characterized as being "data-rich." In biological research, a single laboratory can produce terabytes of data per month that needs to be shared across the research community. Drug development involves analyzing hundreds of compounds with laboratory tests that generate huge amounts of data that must be analyzed and shared. Clinical trials assay thousands of individual data elements on hundreds of patients over many time points.

The objective of this course is to provide the students with the knowledge to address these challenges. We focus on the storage, integration, querying and management of heterogeneous, voluminous, geographically dispersed biomedical data. In addition to primary data, such as experimental data, the methods also address derived data such as those from analyzed microscope images. Examples of pathway analysis methods and the sharing and storage of the data that they generate will be presented. Querying across multiple databases is described, where the databases can be as diverse as microarray experiments, curated databases compiled by domain experts, or biomedical images. Other data sources include medical records, information on disease, references to literature, and biological pathways predicting protein expression. Several current examples from biological research will be presented.

Prerequisites

1.00 Introduction to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving; 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; or experience with Web-based computing.

Reference Materials

There is no recommended text book for this course simply because to the best of our knowledge there is no single text book available that can address the breath and depth of the issues in this course. Hence the reference materials will be lecture notes, research experience of the course instructors in biomedical data management, and a set of research papers.

Term Paper

A term paper is required of all students. The subject of the term paper is the choice of the student, and can as examples be a driving problem in research, a new idea for managing biomedical data, or an improvement on an existing system.

Calendar

Instructors Key:

CFD = Prof. C. Forbes Dewey, Jr. (MIT)
SSB = Prof. Sourav S. Bhowmick (NTU, Singapore)
HY = Prof. Hanry Yu (NUS, Singapore)