Through the end of semester.....Final Blog

Content:
Days are passing so fast. Within a blink of eye, we are through the end of first semester. All lectures gave a basic understanding of various research areas in biomedical informatics. We can now choose our research focus area and advance in it further unveiling interesting concepts.
In the last class, presentations were really interesting and everyone came up with novel ideas in their own way. Project really helped in gaining a deeper understanding on our specific topic. We are all set to take our final exam.
Good luck for the exam.......
Posted by
Harsha Undapalli

last class

 Content:

I really think it is amazing how fast time goes by.  By reflecting back during this semester is when I a realize how much I've learned. On this last week we had presentations and a review session.  We all had an opportunity to  present in a brief summary of out term project.  I really appreciate the feedback given to us by Dr. Kahol.  I agree with Prabal, that four hours of class was too much. At the end I was so hungry my brain was not processing the information given to us.  I really like the review session, it really helps to understand a concept when it is explained through another perspective. thanks.

Posted by P.Ortiz

Wrapping up

Content:

Well as the lectures are done for the year and semester's end is days away, we've had an interesting and great week. First we had 2+ hours of presentations from our fellow classmates on their different research projects that we each chose when we were deers in headlights. (Are we still?) More interesting was how each of us took the research project topics and approached them in unique ways. The feedback from Dr. Kahol was helpful in that he steered us back on track when we deviate from the target state too much.

As well, the review session was very helpful in narrowing down those key themes that Dr. Kahol wants us to focus on. I just wished that we had a bit more time for the review but what was done in the amount of time given was productive.

Posted by Eric

the last week

Content:
This week is the last week of this semester. At this time I would like look back of the past three months. At the beginning of the semester, as a biology student and entirely new to the area of BMI, I was confused about the area. All the lectures in the class of 502 seemed to be unrelated. I did not understand why should I sit their and listen to all those lectures, as I thought some techniques have nothing to do with. Now after a semester, I find out I learned a lot. It seems that all the lectures we have form a network in my head and become a completed jigsaw puzzle of this area. I think the most important thing I learned in this class is that I know what background knowledge and skill I need in my future development. Now I can choose courses in IEE or CSE to make up the deficiency in my background.

Posted by
Jing Lu

Final Blog

Content:
So this week we ended our BMI 502 class on a very high note. There were project  presentations and everyone did exceptionally well. It was great to see that we could actually implement whatever we had learned in the past 16 weeks and everyone  was able to come up with some solutions for their respective projects. My topic was about designing and EMR which has genomic information included into it. My topic was shared by 7 other fellows also and it was really amazing to see that how everybody could come up with so many ideas concerning so many varied subdomains of the main task. Issues were discussed from confidentiality and privacy to building up a decision support system which not only included phenotypic information but also the genomic inforamtion. I came up with an idea of compressing the size of the genome so that we can decrease the large amount of data and make the system for efficient.
I sincierly believe that if  we keep on working like this everyone is going to do great in future.
    

Posted by
Ashutosh

The last week of the first semester!

The last week of the semester was all about review sessions and term project presentations. My topic was "take home medical education"; Gazi and Laura also had the same topic. Instead of what can be implemented for take home medical education, I focused on the overall architecture for a system that can be used in take home medical education. The topic, eventhough I thought initially that I could find sufficient amount of related materials to write on, was very hard for me to come up with a story that would really support take home medical education. I wanted to focus on virtual reality based simulators, but, till now, I couldn't find any of those being considered for take home medical education. I have to do more literature survey on that. Then I thought that something new can be implemented. And that led to a new problem - validation of the system. In fact, the most difficult part was the validation of the VR system because there is no "gold standard" for the validation of a virtual reality based training simulators. Dr. Kahol suggested some key points during the presentation as well, which are very helpful for the validation.

Most of the presentations had something new for me, and they were interesting and informative.  The review session was helpful as expected. Almost 4 hrs in the classroom was not that cool (and I was so hungry at that time ;) ), but when I look back, it was a nice experience.

Good luck for the finals.

Posted by
Prabal

Closing Statement

Content: I loved the presentations by all students and was impressed with the ideas people had come up with. Congratulations to all on having survived a grueling and intense semester.
I did learn a lot of vocabulary and finally at the end of the semester feel comfortable with a few of them, but there is still a long way to go.
I would agree with Debbie and would like to learn methods in BMI hands-on than listen to lectures on how "its being done". I would also like to suggest to include lab work in the classes similar to assignments for Dr Johnson's class and Dr Dinu's class.
All in all I enjoyed being with the class and actually had fun in some of the classes. Thanks to all of you for being just great classmates.

Posted by
Sheetal Shetty

Final Blog: The End of an Era :)

I know we have all learned so much throughout the last few months.  Our projects have really served as a nice complement to all the sub-disciplines that we were introduced to in this course.  Researching for the project was a good launch into the field of BMI because it really showed the complexities of the problems that we are all trying to find solutions for.  There is so much information available to us now that we must organize and structure in a meaningful way.  The project forced me to focus on one area because it is quite overwhelming and seemingly impossible to solve everything at one time.  I appreciate all of the feedback from Dr. Kahol on our presentations.  Good job to everyone on their presentations!
Posted by Annie

Week of 11/30/09

Content:  Thank you Dr. Kahol for giving us the review session.  Also, I thought everyone's presentations were interesting.  Several topics from subjects covered after the midterm were presented in the review.  Those topics covered information such as how tokenization can be done.  Some other topics that Dr. Kahol talked about were chi square tests and clustering in bioinformatics.  In addition, I thought the information that Dr. Kahol described about Dr. Alan Turing was interesting also.

It is interesting that Dr. Turing made such a big impact on computer science.  Also his life story seems interesting and I may want to learn more about him later on.  Anyhow, I hope that everyone does well on their exams and on their papers for this BMI 502 class.

Posted by:  Nate

The FINAL blog for BMI 502 -2009

I thought it might be good to blog about the course.  Even though we filled out a survey, it doesn't capture the meat of the course on meeting the objectives of the course.  The course objectives were:

Understand theoretical foundations with demonstration of current applications of informatics in health sciences and health care delivery systems.


• Clinical information systems
• Biological information systems (includes Bioinformatics, Pharmacy informatics, and Computational Biology)
• Imaging systems
• Population health information systems (includes consumer health systems)
• Health care management and reimbursement systems

Having read this after we have completed the course, I'm not sure if these objectives correctly reflect what we just went through.  This course was about research methodology, not theoretical foundations.  I'm glad it wasn't about theoretical foundation but I found a lot of the information presented in the course difficult to grasp in a 1 hour lecture.  This course was truly intellectually challenging.  There were days when I got it and others where I left wondering if I would ever understand it.

The subjects discussed that would be covered included:

(1) Research Design
(2) Research Methods in Bioinformatics
(3) Research Methods in Imaging Informatics
(4) Electronic Medical Records and Health IT Research
(5) Decision Support
(6) Data Modeling including standards and ontologies
(7) Cost Effectiveness and Economic Analysis through Informatics for Biomedical Domain
(8) Biostatistics
(9) Medical Education Research
(10) Text Mining

I certainly feel the class nailed these topics and more.  One comment though -- 501 and 502 seem to crossover a lot and I continually have to go back and look at the slides to remember where this was taught and understand the context in which it was being presented.  Maybe it's because some of the same instructors presented in the same class, even sometimes on the same day.

I know I have a lot more to learn about data mining, clustering, classifcation, microarrays, etc but I certainly have a much broader vocabulary due to this class.

All in all, this class gave great exposure to the BMI world but I feel many of the topics presented could have had some lab time to give real world meaning to them, especially the math.  We had 100% lecture and it's really hard to comprehend the concepts from just lecture.  If there is a way to include some sort of lab time to look at microarrays or do some clustering examples with a computer that would help for those of use who are not from this area of expertise.

I wish everyone the best of luck in their future education and profession in BMI.  It's a wide open field and open to creative innovation.  Good luck on the final!!

Posted by   Debbie Carter