Summer Projects 2008-2009:

1. Intelligent Notes for Intensive Care Information System (RPAH-ICU)
Min LI
Support from Jon Patrick
The Intelligent Clinical Notes System (ICS) performs high accuracy extraction from clinical notes. This project requires the re-devleopment of the Intelligent notes system.  

2. Generation of a Nursing Clinical Information System (SWAHS-Nursing)
Frans NAKASHIMA
Support from Peter Budd
The project requires the development of a Nursing Information using theGCIMS system generator. Development of a NIS will be according to thedefinitions created by Dr. Vivien Lane.

3. Generation of Trauma - Clinical Information Systems (RPAH-ED)
Joe YIN
Support from Peter Budd
We are currently researching methods for generating clinicalinformation systems. The purpose of this project is create the a TraumaCIS from existing specifications and to test the generating software toidentify its strengths and weaknesses.

4. Data Analytics of Anatomical Pathology Data Warehouse (SSWAHS_SWAPS)
Ritika SHARMA
Support from Yuzhong CHENG
SWAPS is a database of pathology results which has been set up to beanalysed using the CliniDAL software. We are now at the stage ofrunning a research investigation using CLINIDAL to answer a number ofinteresting research questions for the pathology staff. However at thesame time CLINIDAL suffers from a set of limitations in number ofaspects of its design, they are:
A. The User interface is limited and not particularly user friendly and needs improvement.
B. The statistical functions that it uses are primitive and could be improved using other packages.
C. The database access is slow and could be improved
These issues need to be investigated in the context of this researchstudy to ensure the study is successful, the quality of the softwarefrom both an interface and performance point of view is improved andthe correctness of the CLINIDAL computations is verified. This projectwill require working with the SWAPS staff to design research questionsthat can be processed by CliniDAL. In using CliniDAL it will assessedfor its performance both in executing queries and its usability interms of the user interface - where appropriate the UI will bemodified. Performance issued will be documented and investigated so asto create detailed description of them. This project requirescollaboration with Project 5.

5. Introducing Processing Efficiencies into ClinDAL on SWAPS
Yu XIA
Support from Yuzhong CHENG
SWAPS is a database of pathology results which has been set up to beanalysed using the CliniDAL software. We are now at the stage ofrunning a research investigation using CLINIDAL to answer a number ofinteresting research questions for the pathology staff. However at thesame time CLINIDAL suffers from a set of limitations in number ofaspects of its design, they are:
A. The statistical functions that it uses are primitive and could be improved using other packages.
B. The database access is slow and could be improved
These issues need to be investigated so that the quality of thesoftware performance is improved and the correctness of the CLINIDALcomputations is verified. These improvements require an overalldifferent parts of CliniDAL to bring in other processing systems. Thebest example of successful analytics engine can be found with NetEpiAnalysis (http://sourceforge.net/projects/netepi). NetEpi has adatabase indexing strategy that might be useful to CliniDAl but moreimportantly it has a range of functions to access third party graphicsand statistical packages that would enhance CliniDAL.

The aim of this project is complete a two stage transition of the SWAPSapplication. The first stage is to move the SWAPS application from aMySqL database management system to a Postgres DBMS and the assess theperformance changes in the system particularly by using the PostgresEXPLAIN function. The second stage is to introduce a new form ofindexing using the software in the SOOM project and compare the changein performance of the system to the MySQL and Postgres versions of thesystem. The deliverables for this project should be a detailed analysisof the performance of queries in SWAPS for the three different softwareconfigurations. This project requires collaboration with Project 4.

6. Enhancements to the Visual Annotator (VA)
Bacchus BEALE
Support from Matty Farrow
The Visual Annotator is the key technology of the Laboratory. Any NLPsystem needs to use the VA to be able to see the success of itsprocessing. The VA is only in its early stages at the moment and itneeds to be expanded significantly in its functionality both to supportmanual annotation and to post process computed annotation.
This project has the aim of reviewing the functionality of a wide rangeof text annotators and compiling a list of candidate functions that wecould include in our VA. This review will be done by interviewing thestaff of the Laboratory and developing Use Cases from their work and byreviewing the descriptions of other annotators as can be found on theInternet. Subsequently a programme of developing the newfunctionalities will be enacted.