Database community and health related data: Experiences through the last decade

Database community has been involved in topics related to improve data-related techniques or to solve data access efficiency. Health domain has been attracting the interest of database community as an application domain for many database research topics, including: (i) health data heterogeneity (e.g., different health bioim-ages protocols), (ii) data size (e.g., patient health related data), (iii) biomedical signals (e.g., electrocardiography data, ECG), (iv) geographical data (e.g., epidemiological one), and more recently (v) genomic and proteomic data as well as NGS data. In this chapter we present experiences from the last decade, made in a medical school, where we used database experiences to manage and analyse clinical, biological and health related data. The methodology is problem oriented and shows how to start from a problem defined in the medical domain and choose and apply techniques often known by the database community. In this chapter interesting results, in terms of applications to the clinical and medical domains, are reported.