Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Medicel

"Medicel develops technologies and methods to help scientists turn data into information and knowledge." A sophisticated platform in which data from various sources e.g. HPLC, MS can be processed. It would be wonderful if they also have a data mining feature to run commonly used machine learning and data mining algorithms. From a developer's perspective, this platform is excellent, because it satisfies various daily requirements. It is great with 100 engineers developing 7 years. With moderate training, a junior engineer without much biological background can process tremendous amount of data from biological and medical experiments in various formats very efficiently. The cost of the software is also very high --- half a million.

Doctors do not like this software, though, for reasons that I can understand. From a doctor's perspective, it is good enough to have a small tool to complete a specific task. Simplicity is beauty. Too many functions and features are too distracting. They would think I am a doctor, not a programmer. Give me minimum advice, and I can get the work done.

It is still a valuable tool for a bioinformatician to do case analysis. Some ideas in that software can benefit us in our future plan of designing a similar but far simpler platform.

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