Biomedical Informatics Activity

Brief Description:

The biomedical informatics activity involves the development and evaluation of innovative technologies for the coding, storage, retrieval, and transmission of biomedical data. An emphasis of this work will be on bridging the gap between the data captured and the knowledge needed to support clinical practice and research for decision making. The combination of data, knowledge and the necessary tools will lead clinical researchers to the discovery of novel diagnostic and therapeutic methods to improve the health and quality of life of the patient.

Recent Accomplishments:

After being in preparation for at least two years, a consultation subcontract to provide expertise to the biomedical informatics activity has been established with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Ohio State University (OSU) Medical Center. During a recent visit to OSU, HPCIO staff gathered ideas and decided that a good pilot project would be the Vietnam Veterans� Head Injury Study (VHIS) in collaboration with Dr. Jordan Grafman of NINDS and the National Naval Medical Center (NNMC). HPCIO staff discussed with the OSU consultants methods to store, query and retrieve images.

Current and Future Work:

A pilot program focusing on the integration of clinical and image data will be applied to the VHIS. Head-injury CT images that have been acquired for VHIS are transferred from the NNMC to NIH. An open-source DICOM server will be used to store the images while CSIS will be used to retrieve images based on ad hoc patient search query.

HPCIO will continue to explore newly-emerging standards such as web services and XML as mechanisms for text-based transport and exchange of data including systems being used by the CaBIG project. Closer interaction with CaBIG participants is likely.

Collaborators:

• Jordan Grafman, Ph.D., Senior Investigator, Chief, Cognitive Neuroscience Section, NINDS
• Michael C Tierney, M.A., Patient Coordinator, Cognitive Neuroscience Section, NINDS
• John L. Ostuni, Ph.D., Staff Scientist, Clinical Neurosciences Program, NINDS
• Sandi Bonifant, Research Coordinator, Vietnam Head Injury Study, National Naval Medical Center
• Kathy Reding, Research Assistant, Vietnam Head Injury Study, National Naval Medical Center
• Joel Saltz, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chair,  Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University
• Tahsin M. Kurc, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University
• Shannon L. Hastings, Research Specialist, Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University
• Scott Oster, Research Specialist, Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University
• Stephen Langella, Research Specialist, Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University
• Tony Pan,  Research Specialist, Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University

Recent Publications:

Survey of Clinical Knowledge Management and Analysis of Unstructured Text,William Lau, DCB technical Report, 2006.

Performance Metrics:

None to report at this time