OR Spectrum (2008) 30:219–221DOI 10.1007/s00291-007-0115-2

EDITORIAL

Biomedical informatics and OR

H. S. Ryoo · M. Ehrgott

Published online: 5 December 2007© Springer-Verlag 2007

Biomedical informatics is a new and emerging multidisciplinary research area that cangenerally be defined as the application of mathematical, statistical, and computationaltools in analyzing biological and medical information. With its paradigm shiftingfrom classical ‘hypothesis-driven’ into ‘data-driven,’ genetic and medical researchtoday produces a vast amount of information every day. With expertise in analyzingand mining useful information hidden in data and aided by powerful computing hard-ware, the OR society today finds itself ready to play a significant role in advancingbiomedical research by applying and developing theory, models, and algorithms forbetter solving questions and meeting challenges posed by biomedical informatics.

Responding to the advent of the new data-driven biomedical era, we felt a need fora special issue of OR Spectrum that provides a timely and in-depth presentation of thestate and opportunities of OR research in the emerging research field of biomedicalinformatics and extended a call for papers for the special issue in the early 2006. In thefollowing months, we received 10 high quality contribution papers on development,use, and application of OR theory, models, and algorithms for biomedical problems

H. S. Ryoo (B)Division of Information Management Engineering and Graduate School of Information Managementand Security, Korea University, 1, 5-Ka, Anam-Dong, Seongbuk-Ku, Seoul 136-713, Koreae-mail: hsryoo@korea.ac.kr

M. EhrgottDepartment of Engineering Science, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019,Auckland Mail Centre, Auckland 1142, New Zealande-mail: m.ehrgott@auckland.ac.nz

M. EhrgottLaboratoire d’Informatique de Nantes Atlantique FRE CNRS 2729, Université de Nantes,2, rue de la Houssinière, BP 92208, 44322 Nantes Cedex 03, Francee-mail: matthias.ehrgott@univ-nantes.fr

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and selected the following six papers through the rigorous review process of the jour-nal. We briefly detail these six papers below and hope that the reader of OR Spectrumwill find these articles as much a pleasure to read as we did.

The first three papers of this issue focus on issues in genomics. Whasoo Bae andChoongrak Kim address the analysis of microarray data. In their paper “A simplesegmentation method for DNA microarray spots by kernel density estimation,” theypropose a new method for the classification of pixels as fore- or background, i.e.,the segmentation of microarray spots. They suggest two methods for kernel densityestimation of pixel intensities. They apply their method to real data showing that it iseasy to use and very accurate.

The normalization of microarray data is the topic of the paper “An optimal choiceof window width for LOWESS normalization of microarray data” by Jae Won Lee,Myoungshic Jhun, JongYoung Kim and Jung Bok Lee. They present a bootstrap methodto find the optimal window width for the commonly used LOWESS (locally weightedscatterplot smoothing) method. Their method avoids quality problems due to choiceof parameter values in the normalization procedure.

In the third paper in this group entitled “A LAD-based method for selecting shortoligo probes for genotyping applications,” Kwangsoo Kim and Hong Seo Ryoo developa new probe design methodology based on the logical analysis of data for selectingshort oligo probes for genotyping applications. The proposed methodology can beused for the design of DNA and protein chips and for prevention of fatal disease in theevent of a pandemic. In their extensive tests, the proposed method was able to selecta small number of oligo probes of length seven or eight nucleotides that perfectlyclassified all unseen testing sequences.

The following three papers concern topics in medicine and health care. In the paper“Modelling the spread of hepatitis C via commercial tattoo parlours: implicationsfor public health interventions,” Doris A. Behrens, Marion S. Rauner, and JonathanP. Caulkins investigate the cost-effectiveness and optimal timing of regulating tattooparlours, where hepatitis C can be spread through contaminated tattoo equipment.Parameterizing their model with data for Vienna, Austria, they show that regulatingtattoo parlours, as done in Vienna in 2003, is a cost-saving intervention.

The planning of intensity modulated radiotherapy for cancer treatment has attracteda lot of attention in recent years and has become a signature application of OR in med-icine. For this problem, Gino J. Lim, Jaewon Choi, and Radhe Mohan (“Iterativesolution methods for beam angle and fluence map optimization in intensity modu-lated radiation therapy planning”) present a mixed integer programming model for thejoint optimization of irradiation directions and radiation intensity. They develop someheuristics that allow finding good solutions in reasonable computing time.

Matthias Ehrgott and Ines Winz first review the history of radiotherapy treatmentplanning from manual forward planning to optimization based inverse planning intheir article “Interactive decision support in radiation therapy treatment planning.”They argue that the multiobjective optimization methods used today require decisionsupport systems to facilitate the task of treatment planners and outline such a systemcalled CARINA. They illustrate its use with two example treatment planning sessions.

As mentioned earlier, we prepared this special issue of OR Spectrum with intent tohighlight the importance of and opportunities for OR research in the emerging research

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field of biomedical informatics. We hope that our aim is met and extend our thanks tothe authors of all 10 papers that had originally been submitted for the preparation ofthe special issue.

We note that this special issue is complemented with three additional papers onbiomedical issues that have been accepted for publication in the journal. These arethe last three articles of the special issue; specifically, “DRG cost weight volatil-ity and hospital performance” by Ludwig Kuntz, Stefan Scholtes, and Antonio Vera;“A master surgical approach for cyclic scheduling in operating room departments” byJeroen M. van Oostrum, M. Van Houdenhoven, J.L. Hurink, E.W. Hans, G. Wullink,and G. Kazemier; and “Providing radiology health care services to stochastic demandof different customer classes” by Rainer Kolisch and Sabine Sickinger. We also thankthe authors of these papers.

Finally, we thank Hans Otto Günther, the editor-in-chief of OR Spectrum until twoissues before, for his support of and able help in the preparation of this special issue.

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