Clinical and translational informatics encompasses the biomedical informatics subdomains of clinical research informatics, translational bioinformatics, imaging informatics, and their intersections with clinical informatics and public health informatics. Our department's clinical and translational informatics program focuses on the application of informatics theories, methods, and emergent technologies to address fundamental data, information, and knowledge management challenges in the clinical care, clinical research, imaging and translational research domains.
Programs faculty and staff are supported by a variety of intramural and extramural funding sources, including National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), and National Center for Research Resources grant awards (NCRR). Examples of active research and development efforts within the program include:
- The development and implementation of computing platforms to support distributed and federated electronic data interchange spanning the clinical and research domains, and supporting secondary use of existing enterprise information management systems;
- The development of algorithms, tools and technologies to analyze biomedical imaging data. These include algorithm development for utilizing imagery as a phenotyping tool in systems biology and as a biomarker for clinical imaging.
- The design and evaluation of approaches to accelerating and improving clinical and translational research using point-of-care systems such as the Electronic Health Record. Examples include enhancing participant recruitment by leveraging Health IT systems and data, enabling systematic data capture optimized for re-use in research and quality improvement, etc.
- The design and evaluation of web-based research networking tools including collaborative web portals, expertise profiling and matching systems, and emerging Web 2.0 technologies;
- The use of systematic knowledge engineering tools and techniques to support semantic interoperability, phenotype modeling, knowledge sharing and reuse, and knowledge discovery in complex clinical, basic science, and operational contexts;
- The design and dissemination of open-source, standards-based, extensible clinical and translational research data management systems incorporating clinical trial, bio-specimen, and correlative data capture, management, and analysis tools;
- The application of telemedicine technologies to support remote patient monitoring; and
- The integration of bio-molecular measurement data with electronic health record and decision support technologies to enable personalized healthcare delivery.
Services available within this research area:
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