Research methods and Medical Vocabularies

It is true that, as Dr. Greenes mentioned, BMI is an applied field. The domain for BMI research focuses mainly on  human biomedicine and health care systems, which always involves (or should involve) a domain expert. The BMI researchers spend more time on these research areas: modeling the reality, manipulating them, and performing empirical studies on some hypothesis. A research can also be the combination of all three.
A model can be developed using any kind of tools. The tools may be based on probabilities and statistics, or may be work flow networks. Most of the decision support systems are based on probabilities and IF - THEN analysis. We build simulations of real world to manipulate the reality. It is more important to change the parameters of the real world in the simulation and notice the changes. This might help to come up with something interesting. While developing a problem solving systems, we sometimes need to develop some hypothesis and perform some experiments to support that hypothesis.
Dr. Greenes also gave a clear view on what is research and what is not. This is very important for those who don't have any research experience. This lecture gave proper insight of what it takes to do a research and what it needs to be a researcher.

The next lecture, by Dr. Fridsma, was on medical vocabularies and ontologies. We have database systems and knowledge based systems. The basic difference between them is the way they represent knowledge. He also differentiated glossary, controlled vocabulary, taxonomy, and thesaurus. The examples of ICD - 9, UMLS were very helpful to understand the terms. There are many research that includes UMLS as a major tool in medical diagnosis systems. COMET (collaborative medical tutoring system) is one of them. The vocabulary in medical system is so big that many terms are more or less related to each other. Ontology fits in here to find relationships between two or more objects. These topics were a bit difficult to understand, however, their inclusion makes a big impact on research areas in biomedical informatics. 


Posted by Prabal