Medical Informatics Research Projects and Areas
Researchers participating in the UWM Doctoral Program in Medical Informatics, are engaged in many research projects with support from NIH, NSF and private sources. They have also been supported through the UWM campus Research Growth Initiative and the UWM Graduate School.
Below is an overview of some examples of these research projects. More information can be obtained by looking at the web pages of participating faculty.
- Computational Models for Vaccine Design In this project
Dr. Joseph Bockhorst, along with
Dr. Joe Smith (Seattle Biomedical Research Institute) and Dr. Nebojsa Joijic
(Microsoft Research), is investigating machine learning, artificial intelligence
and immuno-informatics approaches to the design of vaccines. Reference:
Link to abstract
- Content Based Retrieval of Medical Images Dr. Charles Kahn (MCW)
and Dr. Joseph Bockhorst are investigating applications of supervised machine
learning methods to retrieve and classify medical images. Reference:
Pubmed Link
- Collaborative Intelligent Health Information Systems Initiative This
is a large multidisciplinary research project that includes the following faculty
from Nursing, CHS, LSB and CEAS: Dr. Sally Lundeen, Dr. Norma Lang, Dr. Amy
Coenen, Dr. Tae Youn Kim, Dr. Tim Patrick, Dr. Hemant Jain, Dr.Humin Zhao, Dr.
Susan McRoy, and PhD students Dr. Kourosh Ravvaz and Dr. Carmelo Gaudioso. This
project investigates issues related to the creation of intelligent health information
systems to improve the safety and quality of health care delivery. The research
group has also established collaborative relationships with researchers at the
Division of Medical Informatics and Nursing Research at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
Funding for this project has come from various sources including NSF and Wisconsin
Initiative for Biomedical and Health Technologies. Reference:
Link to project web page
- Investigating and Annotating Discourse Connectivity in Biomedical Text
This is a project involving Dr. Hong Yu, Dr. Susan McRoy, Ms Nadya Frid and
graduate students Shashank Agarwal and Mary Shimoyama (MCW). Collaborators also
come from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute. The goal of the project is to improve techniques
for biomedical text mining. Funding request from NSF is pending. Reference:
Link to project web page
- BioEx This is an NIH funded project to develop natural language processing
approaches to associate text automatically with images, and then map images
to external ontologies including Gene Ontology. The project is directed by Dr.
Hong Yu (PI) and involves graduate students Shashank Agarwal. Collaborators
include researchers from the University of Colorado (Health Sciences) and the
Jackson Laboratory (a leading genetics research laboratory.) Reference:
Link to project web page
- HERMES This is an NIH funded project to integrate question analysis,
information retrieval and extraction, question answering to automatically provide
physicians clinical evidence extracted from primary biomedical literature to
support evidence-based medicine. The project involves Dr. Hong Yu(PI), Yong
Gang Cao(postdoc), and Minsuk Lee (programmer). Two new PhD students are expected
to be recruited, Collaborators come from the National Library of Medicine and
the University of Iowa. Reference:
Link to project web page
- MEDIKM This research project relates to the design and development
of a prototype breast cancer case knowledge repository based on the open architecture
and web 2.0 technologies. The project is conducted by Dr. Hemant Jain in collaboration
with graduate student Dr. Carmelo Gaudioso. This research aims to make contributions
to issues related to the cost and the complexity of knowledge acquisition and
adaptation for use by physicians. The project is expected to be conducted in
collaboration with a healthcare information systems company and a healthcare
delivery organization. Reference:
Link to
abstract
- Parallel MRI using phased array coils This is an NSF sponsored project,
by Dr. Lei Ying (UWM) with Kevin King (GE Healthcare) and Dr. Zhi-Pei Liang
(University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign). The project aims to develop a theoretical
and algorithmic framework for parallel Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and
to develop and enhance academic-industry collaboration in research and training
of graduate students. Theoretical and algorithmic developments and improvements
will be investigated and will be complemented with experimental work. The project
is expected to have a broad impact in the fields of biomedical imaging, engineering,
medicine and health care delivery as it will improve the fundamentals of MRI
technology with immediate applications in cardiac imaging, functional brain
imaging and cancer imaging. Reference:
Link to CMRI Lab web page
- Tele-educational System for Dental Radiology This project, led by Dr. Min Wu (UWM) with Dr. John Lynch (UWM) along with collaborators from the Marquette University School of Dentistry, is funded by the Wisconsin Initiative for Biomedical and Health Technology. The main goal of the project is to develop an innovative, interactive and web based educational system for dentists to improve their skills in interpreting dental images with tumors. Reference: Link to abstract