Visit at UC San Diego, January 2012

I visited associate professor Wendy Chapman and her research group at iDash at the Division for Biomedical Informatics, UC San Diego, Supercomputing Center in La Jolla, as part of the Interlock collaboration. We discussed the possibility of sharing and releasing clinical textual data for research. One concrete problem discussed with  Dr. Lucila Ohno-Machado (Founding Chief) is that the physical storage of data outside of a country boarders might not be acceptable for each countries’ Ethical committee. One solution to this could be to store the data in each country and then share the data.  Next stop was at ISI/University of Southern California in Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles. I presented some of the research carried out of by our research group IT for Health and specifically how one can use clinical text mining to construct tools that physicians, nurses, clinical researchers and hospital management can make use of to improve the health care processes.