Part of the JONES AND BARTLETT SERIES IN BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS Written for biomedical professionals and hospital practitioners interested in creating their own programs, Perl Programming for Medicine and Biology, discusses and reviews biomedical data resources, data standards, data organization, medicolegal and ethical conduct for data miners, and grants-related data sharing responsibilities. It teaches readers the basic Perl programming skills necessary for collecting, analyzing, and distributing biomedical data and provides solutions to in-depth problems that face researchers and healthcare professionals. Non-technical "Background" sections open each chapter to help non-programmers easily comprehend programming procedures. Explanations are provided for the biomedical issues underlying the Perl scripts that follow, and examples of real-world implementation are provided. Perl Programming for Medicine and Biology will show you how to transform, merge, and examine large and complex databases with ease. Table of Contents Preface 1. Introduction to Perl Programming 2. Using Perl Modules and Applying Some Fundamental Commands 3. File/Directory Operations and Text Transformations with Regular Expressions 4. Indexing Text 5. Autocoding Biomedical Data with Nomenclatures 6. Searching and Mining Data 7. Cryptography and Deidentification 8. Scrubbing Data 9. Finding and Exchanging Data Through the Worldwide Web 10. Creating, Parsing, and Transforming XML 11. Metadata