Australian e-Health Research Centre
Australian e-Health Research Centre Australian e-Health Research Centre

Health Information Environment

The Health Information Environment and Health Information Systems projects at the Australian e-Health Research Centre aim to improve the health outcomes by building technology which improves the use and effectivness of data captured about the patient.

Data is captured about patients in a number of different formats, electronic repositories and using many different terminologies. Our technologies are targeted at understanding the information in the data, whether the data is captured in an electronic health record, coded in a clinical database, physiological data captured from sensors, described in free text in pathology reports or even captured using imaging technology. Our tools for using and building clinical terminologies can be used to describe the data in a way which is machine readable. The new statistical algorithms and visualisation techniques that form part of our research and development provide analysis and display of the data for clinicians, researchers and patients.


HDI

provides private and secure access to an integrated virtual data repository, enabling research and analysis on a larger scale than would be possible on the individual data repositories alone. More about HDI

Clinical Terminology Tools

Clinical terminologies are used to collect health information in a standard way. SNOMED CT, now adopted by Australia as the standard clinical terminology, organises its concepts so that computers can reason over the content of electronic health records. The clinical terminologiy tools being developed at the AEHRC include:
  • Snorocket - a fast classifier for ontologies, such as SNOMED CT.
  • Snapper Platform - a tool for mapping one terminolgies to concepts or expressions of another terminology.
  • ontoserver - a terminology server
More about Clinical Terminology Tools

Clinical Data Acquisition, Integration, Visualisation and Analysis

We are making use of our data acquisition, integration, visualisation and analysis capability to conduct research into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Stroke for the Preventative Health Flagship.

More about Clinical Data Management

Mining Large Complex Datasets

Information acquired during clinical treatments can provide valuable knowledge for medical diagnoses, treatments and prognoses. However with such overwhelming amounts of data now being captured, novel techniques are required to process the data and retrieve the information efficiently and effectively. At AEHRC, we work with clinicians across Australia to develop various database and data mining mechanisms for retrieving rich information from large and complex data sets, such as physiological data, ECG and EEG signals.

More about Mining Large Complex Datasets

Statistical Modelling and Pattern Recognition of Patient Data

The use of ontologies to understand the relationships between data and new mechanisms of processing and integrating data will potentially lead to large datasets which can be analysed to provide information about health service delivery, the initiation and progression -- (or natural history) -- of particular diseases.

The health data and information group at the Australian e-Health Research centre is working with clinicians in Queensland, and across Australia through the CSIRO Preventative Health Flagship, to use advanced statistical methods to capture knowledge from clinical data.

More about Statistical Modelling and Pattern Recognition of Patient Data

Natural Language Processing

With much medical information captured in free text reports, our natural language processing project is researching how clinical information can be extracted from free text reports. The initial project investigated improved ways to access and analyse stored medical reports for the staging of lung cancer patients, resulting in a Cancer Stage Interpretation System (CSIS).

More about CSIS

Combo-Test

Combo-Test is a command-line tool that generates test suites with a minimal set of test cases controllable by the System Under Test inputs and a pre-configured strength control. The tool was developed using Java and utilises a JDBC connection to a pre-installed database.

More about Combo-Test