Medical Informatics Research Projects and Areas

The Medical Informatics PhD program not only serves as a vehicle for advanced graduate education in an important field but in addition it is a strong catalyst for collaborative research.

There are many collaborative projects involving researchers at UWM, MCW and other institutions. In the short span of less than three years, the Medical Informatics faculty members are engaged in many research projects with support from NIH, NSF and private sources. They have also been supported through UWM Research Growth Initiative and Graduate School funding. The grant support has made it feasible to attract post-doctoral researchers and outstanding full-time graduate students.

We outline below examples of collaborative research projects in Medical Informatics. More details about these can be obtained by using the contact information identified for each project.

• 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.
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: bockhorst at uwm dot edu).

• Content Based Retrieval of Medical Images: With Dr. Charles Kahn (MCW), Dr. Joseph Bockhorst is investigating the applications of supervised machine learning methods to retrieve and classify medical images.
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: bockhorst at uwm dot edu  or kahn at mcw dot edu )

• 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. 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.
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: mcroy at uwm dot edu or tp5 at uwm dot edu)

• 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.
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: hongyu at uwm dot edu or mcroy at uwm dot edu).

• 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 and Mary Shimoyama (MCW). Collaborators include researchers from the University of Colorado (Health Sciences) and the Jackson Laboratory (a leading genetics research laboratory.)
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: hongyu at uwm dot edu)
  

• 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.
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: hongyu at uwm dot edu).

• 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.
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: jain at uwm dot edu).

• Parallel MRI using phased array coils: This is an NSF sponsored project 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.
  
  The project director is Dr. Lei Ying. Collaborators are Kevin King (GE Healthcare) and Dr. Zhi-Pei Liang (University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign). Fourgraduate students will also be involved in the research and will be exposed to cutting edge imaging facilities at GE Healthcare.)
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: leiying at uwm dot edu).

• Tele-educational System for Dental Radiology: This project is funded by the Wisconsin Initiative for Biomedical and Health Technology. Dr. Min Wu is the principal investigator and Dr. John Lynch is a collaborator. Other collaborators come from the Marquette University School of Dentistry. 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.
  (Contact e-mail for additional information: wu at uwm dot edu).

As we mentioned earlier we have listed above only a representative sample of the collaborative research projects currently underway in Medical Informatics. More information may be obtained by visiting the homepages of the Medical Informatics faculty.

Our faculty and student research in this field has been reported in prestigious journals including Bioinformatics, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. They have also presented papers in major conferences such as the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium, IEEE Symposium on Computer Based Medical Systems, and International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence.