14-18th September 2009 Staff attendance at the Recent Advantages in NLP Conference.

Jon Patrick attended the RANLP conference and presented a paper jointly authored with Yefeng Wang on computing relationships between entities in clinical notes in the Biomedical Workshop.

31st August Toby Hawker submitted his PhD thesis. Toby has been working at Google Sydney since early in the year and made a final push in August to complete the writing of his thesis on Word Sense Disambiguation. 

19th August 2009 Attendance at HIC2009
Peter Budd and Pooyan Asgari, represented the Laboratory at HIC 2009 in Canberra.

30th July 2009. Suvir Jain completed his summer programme in the Laboratory. He has left with the promise to return which we are looking for ward to. In his time with us he completed a study on creating an optimised list of suggestions for spelling suggestions for unknown words in clinical notes.  

22nd July 2009 Stefan Schafer has joined the Laboratory to study for a PhD on the topic of determining context in clinical notes.

1st July 2009 Forence SAVES from the College of Engineers CESI,
Tolouse is visiting us for 6 months as part of the professional
component for her Masters degree.

1st June 2009 Suvir Jain has join HITRL on a 2 month student internship from the Punjab Institute of Technology.

1st June 2009 QUPP Grant Award
The Laboratory was awarded a $200K grant from the Quality Use of pathology program (QUPP) to continue its work on automatic population of structured report from prose report. The study will deliver a web service for computing structured reports for melanoma, skin cancer and lymphoma pathology reports.  The work is done in collaboration with pathologist Prof Richard Scolyer, Dr Raj Mural and Dr Wendy Cooper along with the advice of the Royal College of Pathologists. 

1st March 2009 Pooyan Asgari has had his candidature  upgraded from MPhil to PhD.

 24th Feb 2009 Min LI has joined the HITRL to commence his PhD on high accuracy information extraction from clinical notes

1st November 2008 Prof Patrick appointed to WHO Committee.
Jon Patrick has been appointed to the Information Modelling group that is overseeing the design of ICD11.

8 Dec 2008

Three graduates from the Laboratory now hold positions at Google.  Casey Whitelaw, Toby Hawker  and Jeremy Fletcher who studied wth the team have positions as software engineers in the Sydney office of Google.

1. 4th August, 2008. Mojtabba Sabbagh joins us for his PhD. Mojtabba is a lecturer at the  Vali-e-Asr  University, Rafsanjan,  Iran. He joins us  along with his wife and young  son for a 3 year stint to complete his PhD.
2. 24th July, 2008. Results published  on the Obesity Challenge. Pooyan Asgari, a PhD scholar in the HITRL received news that his submssion to the Obesity Challenge attained a rank of 7th out of a field of 28 entrants.  This is a fine achievement for someone for whom this is the first challenge task they have entered. 
3. 12th April, 2008. MOU signed with the Sydney West Area Health Service. The University of Sydney has singed an Memorandum of Understanding with the Sydney West Area Health Service to facilitate the uptake of the Health Information Technology Laboratory's technology across the Area Health Service. The two parties will develop proposals together targeting those parts of the HAS that can rapidly adopt new IT innovations to improve productivity and patient care.
4. 27th March, 2008. Launch of the Health Information Technologies web site. This web site was launched in Friday 27th March. It describes the work of the HIT Research Laboratory and provides access to some of its tools with proposals to release more tools over the coming months. A list of enhancement technologies available from the HITRL are described along with all the papers it has published since its inception.
5. 27th March, 2008. Medical Concepts Identifier released. The first tool to be released by the Laboratory is the Medical Concepts identifier. This tool accepts text and identifies the concepts or terms present in a medical thesaurus, terminology, ontology,  or classification (TTOC). The first  release will allow access to SNOMED CT but other systems as APACHE IV, NIC & NOC are also scheduled for release in the not to distant future.
6. 27th March, 2008. SNOMED Viewer being prepared for release. The HITRL is preparing a web service for viewing TTOCs and the first release will provide access to SNOMED CT (scheduled April, 2008). Gradually access will be provided to APACHE IV, NIC & NOC.
7. Feb. 2008. Royal Prince Alfred ICU deploys automated SNOMED CT system. Pulse+IT, Issue 7: February 2008. An article on the use of SNOMED CT in the Intensive Care Service at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney.
8. 19th Nov. 2007. University of Sydney leads the way in hospital technology. News-Medical.Net. Story on the release of the WRIS at the RPAH-ICU.
9. 16th Nov. 2007. Leading the way in hospital technology. A University News  article from October 2007 describing the launch of our technology at the Intensive Care Unit in the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney.
   
10. 13th Nov. 2007. Processor cleans up Doctor's Notes. The Australian, 13th November 2007. An article on the launch of WRIS and CDAL at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney.