ICT Strategies for Bridging Biology and Precision Medicine (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 13342)

Abstract

The systems paradigm of modern medicine presents both, an opportunity and a challenge, for current Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The opportunity is to understand the spatio-temporal organisation and dynamics of the human body as an integrated whole, incorporating the biochemical, physiological, and environmental interactions that sustain life. Yet, to accomplish this, one has to meet the challenge of integrating, visualising, interpreting, and utilising an unprecedented amount of in-silico, in-vitro and in-vivo data related to healthcare in a systematic, transparent, comprehensible, and reproducible fashion. This challenge is substantially compounded by the critical need to align technical solutions with the increasingly social dimension of modern ICT and the wide range of stakeholders in modern healthcare  systems.

Unquestionably, advancing healthcare-related ICT has the potential of fundamentally revolutionising care-delivery systems, affecting all our lives both, personally and -- in view of the enormous costs of healthcare systems in modern societies -- also financially. 

Accordingly, to ponder the options of ICT for delivering the promise of systems approaches to medicine and medical care, medical researchers, physicians,  biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and information--systems experts from three continents and from both, industry and academia, met in Dagstuhl Castle for a  Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop  on ICT Strategies for Bridging Biology and Medicine from August 18 to 23, 2013, to thoroughly discuss this multidisciplinary topic and to derive and compile a comprehensive list of pertinent recommendations -- rather than just to deliver a set package of sanitised powerpoint presentations on medical ICT. The recommendations in this manifesto reflect points of convergence that emerged during the intense analyses and discussions taking place at the workshop. They also reflect a particular attention given to the identification of challenges for improving the effectiveness of ICT approaches to Precision and Systems Biomedicine.