Health Informatics

Multidisciplinary medical applications allow us to fill the gap between the engineering and the medicine. The new era in those applications leads to develop new tasks where engineering methods are reinterpreted with the medical point of view. Optimization is a critical tool in medical informatics where the data size is relatively higher and the decision time is relatively limited than other disciplines. Algorithmic developments integrate new problems within this topic using the optimization theory. In addition, decision making theory provides a better knowledge to tackle with macro level medical problems. Even if medical informatics is a broad topic, our focus is limited with the most challenging problems in this chapter. First of all, a brief survey of the related optimization procedures is introduced within the scope of medicine and engineering. The multidisciplinary tasks in medicine provides a complex follow up using the optimization theory. For this purpose, our study in medical informatics uses a development from the micro level; bioinformatics to the macro level; medical investments and hospital engineering. Furthermore, the sequence alignment problem is introduced through global and local techniques. Medical imaging is considered at the crucial level of preprocessing; segmentation and registration. Strategic medical unit reorganization is reviewed by multi criteria decision method. Finally, another cutting edge problem; medical device selection is resolved using favorable decision making. We concluded our study with future aspects and new trends.