This year's Computational Biology Summer School was dedicated to an area that has become, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the key topics of communication among the professional community and towards the general public: open data and its importance in health and biomedicine. The participants met on 7 September 2022 at the Impact Hub in Brno.
The public demand for open data, which many public and research institutions possess, is logically growing. Not only in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, but also with the increasing possibilities to process and visualise data from various databases of government and other organisations.
Open datasets have a very wide range of applications and uses, but there are also many pitfalls and limitations due to their nature or related legislation. Therefore, the theoretical part was devoted not only to the introduction to the issue as such, but also to the discussion of the extent and why to actually "open" the data. In practice, the participants then tried their hand at processing and visualizing selected datasets, especially with health topics such as cancer screening or psychiatric care. The data and its interpretation have a direct link and impact on health literacy. This is also why one of the supporting themes was the National Health Information Portal and its linkage to reports over available data. In the practical part, selected open datasets were thoroughly analysed and processed together with a detailed discussion.
For the first time in history, the 16th MEFANET conference was held outside the Czech Republic in the Slovak Congress Hotel Centrum in Košice. The whole event was held in the spirit of artificial intelligence in medical education, virtual reality and there were also short presentations by regular participants about their improvement and modernization of teaching.
Over the past three years, not only has a wave of severe respiratory disease swept over virtually all of human civilization, but also a wave of vast amounts of information related to it. A new book by Václav Moravec and Ladislav Dušek deals with this phenomenon that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic and often caused more damage than the virus alone.
