Special issue: Informatics & data-driven medicine

The current state of the development of Medicine today is changing dramatically. Previously, data of the patient's health were collected only during a visit to the clinic. These were small chunks of information obtained from observations or experimental studies by clinicians, and were recorded on paper or in small electronic files. The advances in computer power development, hardware and software tools and consequently design an emergence of miniature smart devices for various purposes (flexible electronic devices, medical tattoos, stick-on sensors, biochips etc.) can monitor various vital signs of patients in real time and collect such data comprehensively. There is a steady growth of such technologies in various fields of medicine for disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy. Due to this, clinicians began to face similar problems as data scientists. They need to perform many different tasks, which are based on a huge amount of data, in some cases with incompleteness and uncertainty and in most others with complex, non-obvious connections between them and different for each individual patient (observation) as well as a lack of time to solve them effectively. These factors significantly decrease the quality of decision making, which usually affects the effectiveness of diagnosis or therapy. That is why the new concept in Medicine, widely known as Data-Driven Medicine, arises nowadays. This approach, which based on IoT and Artificial Intelligence, provide possibilities for efficiently process of the huge amounts of data of various types, stimulates new discoveries and provides the necessary integration and management of such information for enabling precision medical care. Such approach could create a new wave in health care. It will provide effective management of a huge amount of comprehensive information about the patient's condition; will increase the speed of clinician's expertise, and will maintain high accuracy analysis based on digital tools and machine learning. The combined use of different digital devices and artificial intelligence tools will provide an opportunity to deeply understand the disease, boost the accuracy and speed of its detection at early stages and improve the modes of diagnosis. Such invaluable information stimulates new ways to choose patient-oriented preventions and interventions for each individual case.