Imperial Cancer Research Fund Abstract Large databases on compact disk are being published at an increasing rate.
Medical CDs are few in number, but some useful ones are available now, and more are on the way.
Five questions will be addressed. An ordinary compact disk can store 660 Mb of data, equivalent to about 250,000 A4 pages, or up to 25,000 high-quality colour pictures. This would fill over 400 floppy disks. Data compression techniques can more than double the storage capacity. Rapid access Searching through journals or multi-volume textbooks is laborious and often fruitless, whereas the search for information on CD can take less than a second.