Biomedical Informatics in chronic infectious and inflammatory disease research: periodontitis as a case study

The management and control of chronic inflammatory diseases are a major challenge for the health systems of all the European countries. Data collection using new approaches in the field of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) gives the opportunity to build large datasets that can be analyzed. The development and implication of new data warehouse tools that become available for clinicians and researchers, will allow use of newly developed techniques in data mining and visualization. New tools in these fields will help in meta-learning. This opens up new steps towards understanding the (relative) roles of various proposed etiologic factors. The current case study, i.e. periodontitis, will serve as a model for complex chronic inflammatory diseases. A periodontitis data warehouse (PDW) has been structured with the INFOBIOMED network and allows an integrative research approach, where the new field of BMI will contribute to new insights in chronic inflammatory and infectious diseases.