Design of an Anatomy Information System

Biology and medicine rely fundamentally on anatomy. Not only do you need anatomical knowledge to understand normal and abnormal function, anatomy also provides a framework for organizing other kinds of biomedical data. That’s why medical and other health sciences students take anatomy as one of their first courses. The Digital Anatomist Project undertaken by members of the University of Washington Structural Informatics Group aims to “put anatomy on a computer” in such a way that anatomical information becomes as fundamental to biomedical information management as the study of anatomy is to medical students. To do this we need to develop methods for representing anatomical information, accessing it, and reusing it in multiple applications ranging from education to clinical practice. This development process engenders many of the core research areas in biological structural informatics, which we have defined as a subfield of medical informatics dealing with information about the physical organization of the body. By its nature, structural information proves highly amenable to representation and visualization by computer graphics methods. In fact, computer graphics offers the first real breakthrough in anatomical knowledge representation since publication of the first scholarly anatomical treatise in 1546, in that it provides a means for capturing the 3D dynamic nature of the human body. In this article we explain the nature of anatomical information and discuss the design of a system to organize and access it. Example applications show the potential for reusing the same information in contexts ranging from education to clinical medicine, as well as the role of graphics in visualizing and interacting with anatomical representations

Biomedical Informatics Applications for Precision Management of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Modern medicine is in the midst of a revolution driven by “big data,” rapidly advancing computing power, and broader integration of technology into healthcare. Highly detailed and individualized profiles of both health and disease states are now possible, including biomarkers, genomic profiles, cognitive and behavioral phenotypes, high-frequency assessments, and medical imaging. Although these data are incredibly complex, they can potentially be used to understand multi-determinant causal relationships, elucidate modifiable factors, and ultimately customize treatments based on individual parameters. Especially for neurodegenerative diseases, where an effective therapeutic agent has yet to be discovered, there remains a critical need for an interdisciplinary perspective on data and information management due to the number of unanswered questions. Biomedical informatics is a multidisciplinary field that falls at the intersection of information technology, computer and data science, engineering, and healthcare that will be instrumental for uncovering novel insights into neurodegenerative disease research, including both causal relationships and therapeutic targets and maximizing the utility of both clinical and research data. The present study aims to provide a brief overview of biomedical informatics and how clinical data applications such as clinical decision support tools can be developed to derive new knowledge from the wealth of available data to advance clinical care and scientific research of neurodegenerative diseases in the era of precision medicine

Primer for Image Informatics in Personalized Medicine

AbstractImage informatics encompasses the concept of extracting and quantifying information contained in image data. Scenes, what an image contains, come from many imager devices such as consumer electronics, medical imaging systems, 3D laser scanners, microscopes, or satellites. There is a marked increase in image informatics applications as there have been simultaneous advances in imaging platforms, data availability due to social media, and big data analytics. An area ready to take advantage of these developments is personalized medicine, the concept where the goal is tailor healthcare to the individual. Patient health data is computationally profiled against a large of pool of feature-rich data from other patients to ideally optimize how a physician chooses care. One of the daunting challenges is how to effectively utilize medical image data in personalized medicine. Reliable data analytics products require as much automation as possible, which is a difficulty for data like histopathology and radiology images because we require highly trained expert physicians to interpret the information. This review targets biomedical scientists interested in getting started on tackling image analytics. We present high level discussions of sample preparation and image acquisition; data formats; storage and databases; image processing; computer vision and machine learning; and visualization and interactive programming. Examples will be covered using existing open-source software tools such as ImageJ, CellProfiler, and IPython Notebook. We discuss how difficult real-world challenges faced by image informatics and personalized medicine are being tackled with open-source biomedical data and software

eHealth and the need for education in biomedical and health informatics for the physicians in Bulgaria

Introduction. eHealth applications are numerous: electronic health records, evidence-based practice, delivering care from a distance, patient self-care, epidemiological research, healthcare management activities etc. However, the effective provision of healthcare as appropriate to the eHealth environment, needs not only suitable buildings and modern medical equipment, it needs adequately trained healthcare staff.The aim of this study is to assess the readiness and the willingness of the Bulgarian physicians to work in eHealth environment and to give reason for their still actual necessity of education in biomedical and health informatics.Material and methods. An enquiry was carried out in 2013 among the physicians in Bulgaria aiming at the assessment of their knowledge of using computers in their daily medical practice, their attitude to eHealth and their readiness to work in eHealth environment.Results. The results of the study showed the positive attitude of the Bulgarian physicians to information technologies (97%) and their recognized need of using computers in medicine (91.9%). Although 77.49% declared that they have the necessary skills and knowledge to use computers, the study proved that this is just a basic computer literacy (word-processing and Internet). About half of the respondents recognize the need of additional education: databases and medical information systems (37.64%), graphical software (40.59%), statistical software (47.98%), specialized medical software (48.34%). The majority of the participants (86%) wish to personally use computers in their daily medical practice, yet only 38.4% of them wish to enter patient data in a computer by themselves. In fact, only 17.7% are aware of the principles of eHealth.Conclusions. Тhe adequate education in biomedical and health informatics is one of the most important prerequisites for the successful implementation of eHealth in Bulgaria.Keywords: Biomedical and health Informatics, eHealth, computer literacy, IC

What Role Can Process Mining Play in Recurrent Clinical Guidelines Issues? A Position Paper

[EN] In the age of Evidence-Based Medicine, Clinical Guidelines (CGs) are recognized to be an indispensable tool to support physicians in their daily clinical practice. Medical Informatics is expected to play a relevant role in facilitating diffusion and adoption of CGs. However, the past pioneering approaches, often fragmented in many disciplines, did not lead to solutions that are actually exploited in hospitals. Process Mining for Healthcare (PM4HC) is an emerging discipline gaining the interest of healthcare experts, and seems able to deal with many important issues in representing CGs. In this position paper, we briefly describe the story and the state-of-the-art of CGs, and the efforts and results of the past approaches of medical informatics. Then, we describe PM4HC, and we answer questions like how can PM4HC cope with this challenge? 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How to save costs by reducing unnecessary testing: Lean thinking in clinical practice. European Journal of Internal Medicine, 23(1), 70-75. doi:10.1016/j.ejim.2011.07.003Drummond, M. (2016). Clinical Guidelines: A NICE Way to Introduce Cost-Effectiveness Considerations? Value in Health, 19(5), 525-530. doi:10.1016/j.jval.2016.04.020Prior, M., Guerin, M., & Grimmer-Somers, K. (2008). The effectiveness of clinical guideline implementation strategies - a synthesis of systematic review findings. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 14(5), 888-897. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2753.2008.01014.xWatts, C. G., Dieng, M., Morton, R. L., Mann, G. J., Menzies, S. W., & Cust, A. E. (2014). Clinical practice guidelines for identification, screening and follow-up of individuals at high risk of primary cutaneous melanoma: a systematic review. British Journal of Dermatology, 172(1), 33-47. doi:10.1111/bjd.13403Woolf, S., Schünemann, H. J., Eccles, M. P., Grimshaw, J. M., & Shekelle, P. (2012). Developing clinical practice guidelines: types of evidence and outcomes; values and economics, synthesis, grading, and presentation and deriving recommendations. Implementation Science, 7(1). doi:10.1186/1748-5908-7-61Legido-Quigley, H., Panteli, D., Brusamento, S., Knai, C., Saliba, V., Turk, E., … Busse, R. (2012). Clinical guidelines in the European Union: Mapping the regulatory basis, development, quality control, implementation and evaluation across member states. Health Policy, 107(2-3), 146-156. doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2012.08.004Rashidian, A., Eccles, M. P., & Russell, I. (2008). Falling on stony ground? A qualitative study of implementation of clinical guidelines’ prescribing recommendations in primary care. Health Policy, 85(2), 148-161. doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2007.07.011Yang, W.-S., & Hwang, S.-Y. (2006). A process-mining framework for the detection of healthcare fraud and abuse. Expert Systems with Applications, 31(1), 56-68. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2005.09.003Kose, I., Gokturk, M., & Kilic, K. (2015). An interactive machine-learning-based electronic fraud and abuse detection system in healthcare insurance. Applied Soft Computing, 36, 283-299. doi:10.1016/j.asoc.2015.07.018Pryor, T. A., Gardner, R. M., Clayton, P. D., & Warner, H. R. (1983). The HELP system. Journal of Medical Systems, 7(2), 87-102. doi:10.1007/bf00995116Shahar, Y., Miksch, S., & Johnson, P. (1998). The Asgaard project: a task-specific framework for the application and critiquing of time-oriented clinical guidelines. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 14(1-2), 29-51. doi:10.1016/s0933-3657(98)00015-3Boxwala, A. A., Peleg, M., Tu, S., Ogunyemi, O., Zeng, Q. T., Wang, D., … Shortliffe, E. H. (2004). GLIF3: a representation format for sharable computer-interpretable clinical practice guidelines. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 37(3), 147-161. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2004.04.002Terenziani, P., Molino, G., & Torchio, M. (2001). A modular approach for representing and executing clinical guidelines. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 23(3), 249-276. doi:10.1016/s0933-3657(01)00087-2Sutton, D. R., & Fox, J. (2003). The Syntax and Semantics of the PROformaGuideline Modeling Language. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10(5), 433-443. doi:10.1197/jamia.m1264Musen, M. A., Tu, S. W., Das, A. K., & Shahar, Y. (1996). EON: A Component-Based Approach to Automation of Protocol-Directed Therapy. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 3(6), 367-388. doi:10.1136/jamia.1996.97084511Ciccarese, P., Caffi, E., Quaglini, S., & Stefanelli, M. (2005). Architectures and tools for innovative Health Information Systems: The Guide Project. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 74(7-8), 553-562. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2005.02.001Shiffman, R. N., & Greenes, R. A. (1994). Improving Clinical Guidelines with Logic and Decision-table Techniques. Medical Decision Making, 14(3), 245-254. doi:10.1177/0272989x9401400306Peleg, M., Tu, S., Bury, J., Ciccarese, P., Fox, J., Greenes, R. A., … Stefanelli, M. (2003). Comparing Computer-interpretable Guideline Models: A Case-study Approach. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10(1), 52-68. doi:10.1197/jamia.m1135Karadimas, H., Ebrahiminia, V., & Lepage, E. (2018). User-defined functions in the Arden Syntax: An extension proposal. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 92, 103-110. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2015.11.003Peleg, M., Keren, S., & Denekamp, Y. (2008). Mapping computerized clinical guidelines to electronic medical records: Knowledge-data ontological mapper (KDOM). Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 41(1), 180-201. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2007.05.003German, E., Leibowitz, A., & Shahar, Y. (2009). An architecture for linking medical decision-support applications to clinical databases and its evaluation. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 42(2), 203-218. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2008.10.007Marcos, M., Maldonado, J. A., Martínez-Salvador, B., Boscá, D., & Robles, M. (2013). Interoperability of clinical decision-support systems and electronic health records using archetypes: A case study in clinical trial eligibility. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 46(4), 676-689. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2013.05.004Marco-Ruiz, L., Moner, D., Maldonado, J. A., Kolstrup, N., & Bellika, J. G. (2015). Archetype-based data warehouse environment to enable the reuse of electronic health record data. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 84(9), 702-714. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2015.05.016Gooch, P., & Roudsari, A. (2011). Computerization of workflows, guidelines, and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 18(6), 738-748. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2010-000033Quaglini, S., Stefanelli, M., Cavallini, A., Micieli, G., Fassino, C., & Mossa, C. (2000). Guideline-based careflow systems. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 20(1), 5-22. doi:10.1016/s0933-3657(00)00050-6Schadow, G., Russler, D. C., & McDonald, C. J. (2001). Conceptual alignment of electronic health record data with guideline and workflow knowledge. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 64(2-3), 259-274. doi:10.1016/s1386-5056(01)00196-4González-Ferrer, A., ten Teije, A., Fdez-Olivares, J., & Milian, K. (2013). Automated generation of patient-tailored electronic care pathways by translating computer-interpretable guidelines into hierarchical task networks. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 57(2), 91-109. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2012.08.008Shabo, A., Parimbelli, E., Quaglini, S., Napolitano, C., & Peleg, M. (2016). Interplay between Clinical Guidelines and Organizational Workflow Systems. Methods of Information in Medicine, 55(06), 488-494. doi:10.3414/me16-01-0006Mulyar, N., van der Aalst, W. M. P., & Peleg, M. (2007). A Pattern-based Analysis of Clinical Computer-interpretable Guideline Modeling Languages. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 14(6), 781-787. doi:10.1197/jamia.m2389Grando, M. A., Glasspool, D., & Fox, J. (2012). A formal approach to the analysis of clinical computer-interpretable guideline modeling languages. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 54(1), 1-13. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2011.07.001Kaiser, K., & Marcos, M. (2015). Leveraging workflow control patterns in the domain of clinical practice guidelines. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 16(1). doi:10.1186/s12911-016-0253-zMartínez-Salvador, B., & Marcos, M. (2016). Supporting the Refinement of Clinical Process Models to Computer-Interpretable Guideline Models. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 58(5), 355-366. doi:10.1007/s12599-016-0443-3Decision Model and Notation Version 1.0https://www.omg.org/spec/DMN/1.0Ghasemi, M., & Amyot, D. (2016). Process mining in healthcare: a systematised literature review. International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, 9(1), 60. doi:10.1504/ijeh.2016.078745Rebuge, Á., & Ferreira, D. R. (2012). Business process analysis in healthcare environments: A methodology based on process mining. Information Systems, 37(2), 99-116. doi:10.1016/j.is.2011.01.003Rovani, M., Maggi, F. M., de Leoni, M., & van der Aalst, W. M. P. (2015). Declarative process mining in healthcare. Expert Systems with Applications, 42(23), 9236-9251. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2015.07.040Rojas, E., Munoz-Gama, J., Sepúlveda, M., & Capurro, D. (2016). Process mining in healthcare: A literature review. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 61, 224-236. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2016.04.007Lenkowicz, J., Gatta, R., Masciocchi, C., Casà, C., Cellini, F., Damiani, A., … Valentini, V. (2018). Assessing the conformity to clinical guidelines in oncology. Management Decision, 56(10), 2172-2186. doi:10.1108/md-09-2017-0906Fernández-Llatas, C., Benedi, J.-M., García-Gómez, J., & Traver, V. (2013). Process Mining for Individualized Behavior Modeling Using Wireless Tracking in Nursing Homes. Sensors, 13(11), 15434-15451. doi:10.3390/s131115434Qu, G., Liu, Z., Cui, S., & Tang, J. (2013). Study on Self-Adaptive Clinical Pathway Decision Support System Based on Case-Based Reasoning. Frontier and Future Development of Information Technology in Medicine and Education, 969-978. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7618-0_95Van de Velde, S., Roshanov, P., Kortteisto, T., Kunnamo, I., Aertgeerts, B., Vandvik, P. O., & Flottorp, S. (2015). Tailoring implementation strategies for evidence-based recommendations using computerised clinical decision support systems: protocol for the development of the GUIDES tools. Implementation Science, 11(1). doi:10.1186/s13012-016-0393-

OBML - Ontologies in Biomedicine and Life Sciences

The OBML 2010 workshop, held at the University of Mannheim on September 9-10, 2010, is the 2(nd) in a series of meetings organized by the Working Group “Ontologies in Biomedicine and Life Sciences” of the German Society of Computer Science (GI) and the German Society of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS). Integrating, processing and applying the rapidly expanding information generated in the life sciences — from public health to clinical care and molecular biology — is one of the most challenging problems that research in these fields is facing today. As the amounts of experimental data, clinical information and scientific knowledge increase, there is a growing need to promote interoperability of these resources, support formal analyses, and to pre-process knowledge for further use in problem solving and hypothesis formulation. The OBML workshop series pursues the aim of gathering scientists who research topics related to life science ontologies, to exchange ideas, discuss new results and establish relationships. The OBML group promotes the collaboration between ontologists, computer scientists, bio-informaticians and applied logicians, as well as the cooperation with physicians, biologists, biochemists and biometricians, and supports the establishment of this new discipline in research and teaching. Research topics of OBML 2010 included medical informatics, Semantic Web applications, formal ontology, bio-ontologies, knowledge representation as well as the wide range of applications of biomedical ontologies to science and medicine. A total of 14 papers were presented, and from these we selected four manuscripts for inclusion in this special issue. An interdisciplinary audience from all areas related to biomedical ontologies attended OBML 2010. In the future, OBML will continue as an annual meeting that aims to bridge the gap between theory and application of ontologies in the life sciences. The next event emphasizes the special topic of the ontology of phenotypes, in Berlin, Germany on October 6-7, 2011

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field

Nanoinformatics: developing new computing applications for nanomedicine

Nanoinformatics has recently emerged to address the need of computing applications at the nano level. In this regard, the authors have participated in various initiatives to identify its concepts, foundations and challenges. While nanomaterials open up the possibility for developing new devices in many industrial and scientific areas, they also offer breakthrough perspectives for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In this paper, we analyze the different aspects of nanoinformatics and suggest five research topics to help catalyze new research and development in the area, particularly focused on nanomedicine. We also encompass the use of informatics to further the biological and clinical applications of basic research in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and the related concept of an extended ?nanotype? to coalesce information related to nanoparticles. We suggest how nanoinformatics could accelerate developments in nanomedicine, similarly to what happened with the Human Genome and other -omics projects, on issues like exchanging modeling and simulation methods and tools, linking toxicity information to clinical and personal databases or developing new approaches for scientific ontologies, among many others

High-throughput next-generation sequencing technologies foster new cutting-edge computing techniques in bioinformatics

The advent of high-throughput next generation sequencing technologies have fostered enormous potential applications of supercomputing techniques in genome sequencing, epi-genetics, metagenomics, personalized medicine, discovery of non-coding RNAs and protein-binding sites. To this end, the 2008 International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (Biocomp) – 2008 World Congress on Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Applied Computing (Worldcomp) was designed to promote synergistic inter/multidisciplinary research and education in response to the current research trends and advances. The conference attracted more than two thousand scientists, medical doctors, engineers, professors and students gathered at Las Vegas, Nevada, USA during July 14–17 and received great success. Supported by International Society of Intelligent Biological Medicine (ISIBM), International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design (IJCBDD), International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalized Medicine (IJFIPM) and the leading research laboratories from Harvard, M.I.T., Purdue, UIUC, UCLA, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, U. of Minnesota, U. of Iowa etc, the conference received thousands of research papers. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers and accepted papers were required to satisfy reviewers' comments. Finally, the review board and the committee decided to select only 19 high-quality research papers for inclusion in this supplement to BMC Genomics based on the peer reviews only. The conference committee was very grateful for the Plenary Keynote Lectures given by: Dr. Brian D. Athey (University of Michigan Medical School), Dr. Vladimir N. Uversky (Indiana University School of Medicine), Dr. David A. Patterson (Member of United States National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, University of California at Berkeley) and Anousheh Ansari (Prodea Systems, Space Ambassador). The theme of the conference to promote synergistic research and education has been achieved successfully

Health informatics domain knowledge analysis: An information technology perspective

Health Informatics is an intersection of information technology, several disciplines of medicine and health care. It sits at the common frontiers of health care services including patient centric, processes driven and procedural centric care. From the information technology perspective it can be viewed as computer application in medical and/or health processes for delivering better health care solutions. In spite of the exaggerated hype, this field is having a major impact in health care solutions, in particular health care deliveries, decision making, medical devices and allied health care industries. It also affords enormous research opportunities for new methodological development. Despite the obvious connections between Medical Informatics, Nursing Informatics and Health Informatics, most of the methodologies and approaches used in Health Informatics have so far originated from health system management, care aspects and medical diagnostic. This paper explores reasoning for domain knowledge analysis that would establish Health Informatics as a domain and recognised as an intellectual discipline in its own right