IDEAS Research Group

Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis in the Medical Domain

Many challenges are now faced by modern healthcare organisations; in the face of an exponential growth in medical knowledge, research, protocols and guidelines, coupled with the imposition of increasing temporal and financial constraints, it is generally acknowledged that no clinician can be fully aware of, and therefore practice according to all of the existing data. Consequently, there is an increasing demand within medicine for tools and techniques that can provide solutions in this complex domain.

To aid in the resolution of some of these challenges, technology is increasingly being adopted within a healthcare setting, for example in the form of patient monitoring systems and electronic health records. These systems routinely generate large volumes of physiological data. The abundance of data available in the medical domain can be considered as an important resource which could revolutionalise clinical research and enable new ways to carry out biomedical research. Innovative solutions to clinical research with a focus on the combination of unique software infrastructure for data collection and novel approaches to analysis are required to allow clinicians and scientists to exploit these resources.

The aim of the IDEAS research group is to explore and develop novel mathematical modelling and computer science approaches which enable medical knowledge to be discovered from these datasets and to provide tools which help to support clinical reasoning. Particular interests of the group include: the modelling of physiological systems, for example, cerebral autoregulation; knowledge engineering and the semantic web for healthcare applications; and the understanding and capture of medical expertise.

As part of this research, the group works closely with clinicians and other researchers from a number of institutions. Further details of specific research can be found on the relevant staff pages. If you think that your work would be of interest to the IDEAS research group, or you would like to work with us, please contact us at: info@ideasresearch.org.