|
|
|
  |
|
|
Student Research
From UMASS Lowell eNews ... October 2006 ... Bioinformatics Students Create Clinical Data Transfer Protocols
From left, graduate students in the Bioinformatics Program are Jianping Zhou, John Sharko, Christine Lawrence and Brian Drohan. Graduate bioinformatics and medical informatics students, working with Prof. Georges Grinstein of the Computer Science Department, have developed software that will allow family history of disease and clinical genomic information to be stored electronically, managed and transferred from one institution to another. In addition, the process will help identify high-risk patients. The team collaborates with experts at Massachusetts General Hospital and IBM of Israel, and has successfully launched a pilot program in use at MGH. The group expects to reach a significant milestone soon – the adoption of their work by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). “With all of the major issues resolved last month, we are expecting to pass committee-level balloting in the next cycle,” says graduate student Brian Drohan. “It’s a bit surprising to think that such a technology doesn’t exist today, bot for us it represents an exciting opportunity to contribute.” Patients tend to have multiple medical records, sometimes from different hospitals or clinics, which contain disparate information about patient and family health history. The UML students found that missing and conflicting information are common. They have worked on innovative software to “clean” patient records for research purposes, as well as techniques for clinical analysis of genetic testing and family history information – what is known as a patient pedigree. “The pedigree is a graphical visualization of a patient's familial association, including their genetic traits and history of disease,” says Christine Lawrence, a biomedical engineering doctoral candidate. “The challenge with pedigrees is to display a large variety of information, such as cancer risk factors, for each relative and not hinder a clinician’s ability to spot a hereditary syndrome.”
Contact us - University
of Massachusetts Lowell Bioinformatics & Cheminformatics
|
