Página 5 - GIB_Brochure 2013

An often-cited definition of the area has
been proposed by Ted Shortliffe:
The
rapidly developing scientific field that
deals with the storage, retrieval, and
optimal use of biomedical information,
data, and knowledge for problem solving
and decision making. It accordingly tou-
ches on all basic and applied fields in
biomedical science and is closely tied to
modern information technologies, nota-
bly in the areas of computing and com-
munications.
Many areas have been es-
tablished, including topics such as deci-
sion support systems, electronic health
records, hospital information systems,
data and text mining, information re-
trieval, bibliographic systems, medical
imaging, etc.
Over the last 20 years, new areas have
been introduced, such as merging medi-
cal informatics with bioinformatics, into
what is called biomedical informatics.
Then, areas such as translational bioin-
formatics have emerged. Fundamental
topics include Web-based applications,
the introduction of social networks, bio-
medical ontologies, semantic interopera-
bility, Big Data research and others.
Whereas the GIB has worked in various
of these topics, the group has intensively
participated in pioneering two challen-
ging areas:
(1)
nanoinformatics, a new field at the
intersection between informatics and
nanomedicine and nanotechnology, and
(2)
educating health professionals in
Africa in various áreas — e.g., evidence-
based medicine, biomedical informatics
through the use of advanced informa-
tion technologies such as Web 2.0 appli-
cations and e-learning.
In 1994, the GIB began his long term
involvement with Internet-based medical
informatics research. Various projects
related to topics such as heterogeneous
database integration, protocol-based
decision support, expert systems, data
mining, image processing, visualization
and analysis, surgical planning were
started at the time. Such focus on Inter-
net-based activities was awarded one of
the five grants of the HISE (Health Infor-
mation Strategic Initiative, by Hewlett-
We have developed a large number of
software systems, for companies, hospi-
tals or as a result of our R&D activities
within 11 European Commission projects
and around 20 national projects:
1.
ONTOFUSION: a number of tools for
heterogeneous database integration
2.
Brokerage Service (applied for Mobility
and Training)
3.
OntoDataClean: for data mining
4.
BIRI and eMIR2: inventories of re-
sources: for storing and accessing re-
mote software tools
5.
Protocol manager: multimedia tools
for practice guidelines and protocols
6.
Vocabulary server: for managing bio-
medical ontologies and terminologies
7.
Mapping tool: for semantic integration
of terminologies and ontologies
8.
SIAC: an expert system for medical
emergency management
9.
Clinical trials manager: for managing
clinical trials on cancer
10.
Gene-Pdf: to convert contents of pdf
files containing genetic information
11.
Open PACS builder: a system for
building small PACS
12.
Numerous Web services and soft-
ware tools for image processing, visu-
alization, data management and text
and data mining
13.
A database for organ transplantation
management
14.
A software tool for remote collabora-
tive work
15.
Peer to peer image exchange tool
16.
Geographical Information System
linked to hotel reservations
17.
An e-learning tool, for distance train-
ing
18.
The Africa Build Portal, a social net-
work for African health professionals
19.
PubDNA finder
20.
CDA Pubmed, a tool to link electronic
health records to the literature
21.
Spanish MeSH browser for Pubmed
22.
A nanotoxicity search tool
23.
A tool for automatically detecting
shapes on nanoparticles
Packard, with groups from Harvard-MIT,
Columbia, Berlin and UCLA)
This grant facilitated a first-class infras-
tructure for the group, whose develop-
ments began at this moment. In the last
two decades, the GIB has reported publi-
cations in the most important conferen-
ces in the field, as well as journals such
as The Journal of the American Medical
Informatics Association (JAMIA), Journal
of Biomedical Informatics, Methods of
Information in Medicine, BMC Bioinfor-
matics, Bioinformatics, BMC Medical In-
formatics and Decision Making, Nature,
JASIST, Pattern Recognition, Pediatric
Research, International Journal of Nano-
medicine, Computing, Journal of Internal
Medicine, Expert Systems with Applica-
tions, Computers in Biology and Medici-
ne, Computer Methods and Programs in
Biomedicine and others.
The GIB has participated in many R&D&i
activities. International collaborations
began with the Decision Systems Group,
from the Harvard-MIT Health Science
and Technology division, led by Profs.
Bob Greenes and Lucila Ohno Machado.
A total of six researchers participated in
this exchange at Boston. This collabora-
tion has been extended to other US insti-
tutions such as Rutgers University (Prof.
Casimir Kulikowski), Georgia Tech (Prof.
Norberto Ezquerra), the University of
Utah (Profs. Joyce Mitchell and Julio
Facelli), hospitals and universities, with
the participation in many joint projects
and activities, including technology
transfer.
In 2011, Prof. Maojo was elected a
Fellow of ACMI, the American College of
Medical Informatics, for his contributions
to the area of medical informatics.
Biomedical Informatics
Collaborations
Software Development