Biomedical Informatics Day Two (and Three)

September 28th, 2005 Stewart

Ah well, lofty goals. I seem to have fallen a little behind in getting these posts up. It is to the credit of this course that the days are so filled with instruction and other networking activities (read “beers at Cap’n Kidd“) that I’ve found it difficult to find time to post.

Yesterday there were presentations by Jim Cimino on controlled vocabulary and desiderata for terminology systems, and by Ted Shortliffe on the nature of diagnostic support systems. This could have been intimidating, sort of like being taught physics by Stephen Hawking, but the actual sessions were exceptionally worthwhile and the presenters themselves were very approachable.

And, yes, the informal networking has been really useful as well. Like-minded, interested budding informaticians from many different disciplines and different walks-of-life, frankly, get together and share some knowledge. In fact, my only real criticism of the structure of the course is that it is mostly lecture-based. Those times when the students have gotten involved in the discsussion have really been the shining moments of the course so far.

This morning, in fact, we had two of our best presentations, one on consumer health informatics and the other on public health informatics. The dialogue has been crisp, useful, and interesting.

Okay, enough for now. I’ve got about a half-dozen new ideas for various projects to start-up on my return to Buffalo, and I need to get them written down somewhere. More to come.

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Biomedical Informatics Day One

September 26th, 2005 Stewart

Although many of the sessions today reviewed material that had been covered before in the MHI program, I still picked up on concepts and ideas that I think will be useful to me. In particular, the genomics talk introduced me to a neat new resource, and the database design section helped to crystallize some rules for database building that will definitely influence my next database project.

I think this is going to be an outstanding week. Tonight we’re going to build some test databases and tomorrow we’ll be covering more “in depth” biomedical informatics material. The food is plentiful, the instruction is sound, and I’m having a tremendous time.

More to come tomorrow.

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The "Woods Hole" Course

September 26th, 2005 Stewart

I’m posting this from Woods Hole, MA at the Marine Biology Lab. I was accepted into the National Library of Medicine’s Biomedical Informatics course and we begin our sessions today. Along with all the notes I plan on taking, I thought I might post a few of my more unusual thoughts or ideas to the blog.

My only initial comment, though, is just “Wow.” Woods Hole is just beautiful, a picture-perfect Cape Cod environment for this course. I can hardly wait to get started.

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