The science, or perhaps art, of data mining has received a lot of notice in the business world as ways to do specialized marketing to previous customers. In this book editors Wong (Harvard Medical School) and Li (IBM) have collected a series of chapters on the application of data mining techniques in the field of life sciences.

The particular applications showing promise include:

bio-surveillance
disease outbreak detection
high throughput bioimaging
drug screening
preidtive toxicology
biosensors
and more.

This is a brand new field offering some tremendous opportunities to provide for finding breakthroughs in the identification of problem areas within the normal data being collected for other reasons. This book is the first to discuss this cutting edge technology, still in the formative stages, but rapidly moving into the main stream.