NSF Break-out Group: Medical Informatics

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NSF Break-out GroupMedical Informatics

• Coordinator Wanda Pratt
• Scribe Betty Salzberg

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High-Level Challenge

• The balancing act
• Medically useful
• Informatics research challenge not service!
• Win-win collaborations

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NSF Strengths over NIH

• Non-disease specific
• Broad perspective
• Applicability to a large class of medical
  problems
• Further fundamental research in Information
  Data Management
• Innovative, long-term, risky vision

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Characteristics of Biomedical Domain

• Data, Information, Knowledge
• Voluminous
• Dirty, biased, based on implicit assumptions
• Uncertain
• Dynamic
• Long lived
• Textual, visual, spatiotemporal
• Environment
• Requires privacy security measures
• Life critical
• Busy users
• Different types of users
• (e.g., physicians, nurses, biologists,
  technicians, patients, etc.)

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Implications for Research Directions

• Spans all CISE themes
• Ontologies
• Data information integration
• Knowledge discovery and analysis
• Human-computer interaction
• Software engineering

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Ontologies

• Development by domain experts
• Maintenance as knowledge changes
• Connected to data and information that support it
• Support of multiple perspectives

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Information Integration

• Diversity
• Systems to process and store information
• Sources of information
• Types of information (text, sensor data, images,
  sound, etc.)
• High documentation needs
• Links to sources
• Assumptions of sources
• Privacy and security regulations

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Knowledge Discovery and Analysis

• Processing large volumes
• Finding useful patterns
• Detecting and dealing with redundancy
• Accounting for uncertainty
• Showing connections
• Revisiting old information/data when we have new
  knowledge

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Human-Computer Interaction Software Engineering

• Spans everything
• Ontologies
• Information integration
• Knowledge discovery and analysis

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Recommendations for NSF

• Funding for overhead of data cleaning
  management
• Funding for programmers
• Funding for biomedical collaborators