Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Applying Ontology and Semantic Web Technologies to Clinical and Translational Studies

Seminar Slides: Download (PDF)

When: Thursday, February 13, 2014
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Cui Tao, University of Texas, Houston

Host: Prof. Zhigang Deng

The recent large-scale deployment of Electronic Health Records (EHR) across medical institutions provides new opportunities of secondary use of EHR for clinical and Translational studies. One prerequisite of meaningful use of EHR data is Interoperability among knowledge, data, and applications in healthcare IT. Here we share our vision on applying semantic web techniques to clinical knowledge and data representation, as well as to retrieve useful information and knowledge from EHR. In particular, we will introduce our efforts on (1) representing and normalizing large-scale EHR data in semantic web notations to enable automatic consistency checking and semantic reasoning; (2) temporal information modeling, extraction, and reasoning for patient medical history and time trending analysis; and (3) phenotyping over SHARPn normalized data using the Description Logic and Semantic Web Rule Language.

Bio:
Dr. Cui Tao received a PhD and an MS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and a BS in Biology Minor in Computer Science from Beijing Normal University. Her research focuses on ontology generation, conceptual modeling and information extraction over the application on biomedical and clinical data.

Dr. Tao has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, which have been published in journals or conferences of international circulation, Her articles have been cited in over 450 publications by other researchers. She has been awarded 1 patent by the USPTO.

Dr. Tao is one of the organizing chairs of the International Conference (MIXHS), and International Workshop series on Vaccine and Drug Ontology Studies (VDOS). She has served as an editor for 5 special issues for the Journal of Biomedical Semantics, journal of Cancer Informatics, and Methods of Information in Medicine. Dr. Tao is a program committee member for many international conferences and workshops and has been invited to peer-review hundreds of publications.