Engineering Principles in Biomedical Informatics

Engineering is one of the main pillars of biomedical informatics, providing design principles, methods, and tools for the effective implementation of computational solutions in health care. The basic engineering approach consists of a number of phases, comprising modeling, designing, testing, and verifying. Such an approach has become widely applied in biomedical informatics. In this chapter, we analyze three different engineering approaches crucial for biomedical informatics: (1) the design of computational solutions that use the Unified Modeling Language (UML); (2) the representation, simulation, and learning of careflow systems; and, finally, (3) the role that engineering has in data mining, with a specific focus on temporal data and dynamical systems, as well as on principles for engineering the data analysis process.