On January 1, 2003 the University Washington was awarded a 3 year grant (January
1, 2003-Nov 30, 2005) from the National Library of Medicine to plan for a National
Center of Excellence in Biomedical Computing as part of the NIH Biomedical Information
Science Technology Initiative (BISTI), grant number P20 LM007714. We are
currently in a no-cost extension through Nov 30, 2006. The planning grant is a
joint effort among faculty and students
in the Department of Biological
Structure and the Division of
Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), Department
of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, with strong collaborations
from the Department of Computer Science
and Engineering.
As noted in the abstract and specific
aims of the proposal, the primary scientific goal of our efforts is to develop
methods that will help to bring about an information framework that links together
diverse types of biomedical data and knowledge in a large scale distributed
information system. The specific activities of the planning grant to reach this
goal are organized by four cores and three projects. The following provides
a few highlights of work in these areas:
Much of the initial effort for the planning core was the preparation of a proposal for a full BISTI Center. Although this proposal was not subsequently funded, the planning process, as well as the specific development projects, have resulted in several research products, as well as new initiatives that we are pursuing as part of the overall mission of the Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) Program at the University of Washington.
Perhaps the most important outcome of this planning process is the realization that BHI has particular strengths in local lab data management, data integration, ontology development and alignment, content-based retrieval, and visualization, all of which are components of the grand vision of developing a global information framework for biomedical knowledge and data. This realization, together with plans to co-locate BHI faculty and students in one place, should result in many new collaborative proposals among BHI and affiliated faculty to exploit and integrate these strengths. Initiatives that are currently funded or are under development include collaborations with the new Stanford National Center for Biomedical Ontology Research, and several projects with the UW computer science department for content-based retrieval, data integration, and probabalistic databases. We expect these types of proposals to increase in the future.
The administration core supported the logistics of submitting the full proposal and organized many of the planning meetings. The computer core provides system administration support, and maintains ongoing applications. The education core developed several biomedical informatics courses, and organized a medical school wide Frontiers in Biomedical Research symposium on biomedical informatics.
This project has applied many of the techniques developed in other areas to a lab studying cataract development, in the process creating a lab management system for cataract image data, and several approaches to content-based image retrieval. A general purpose tool for creating a web-based lab management system was developed based on this experience, and proposals are pending for this tool to be applied to several other areas, inclding protein-protein interactions and clinical trials.
Described in John Gennari's web pages.
Described as part of the Biomediator data integration project.