Researchers in Referent Tracking
RTU researchers
Werner Ceusters studied medicine, neuro-psychiatry,
informatics and knowledge engineering in Belgium. Since 1993, he has been
involved in numerous national and European research projects in the area of
Electronic Health Records, Natural Language Understanding and Ontology.
Prior to coming to Buffalo, he was Executive Director of the
European
Centre for Ontological Research at Saarland University, Germany.
He is currently Professor in the
Psychiatry Department of the School of Medicine and Biomedical
Sciences, SUNY at Buffalo NY, Director of the Ontology Research Group of
the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences,
and coordinator of Bioinformatics for the Health Science Faculties at UB.
Ron Rudnicki has a Master of Arts in Philosophy from SUNY at Buffalo and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Canisius College. Ron joins the RTU from Gartner where he acted as a Software Engineer developing a Business Intelligence application that supports Gartner’s IT Benchmarking service.
Ron was the Business Process Analyst of the RTU, analyzing the electronic healthcare record related business process requirements for all healthcare and associated enterprises in the wider Buffalo area.
Shahid MANZOOR has a Master In Computer Science from the National College of Computer Science in Lahore, Pakistan, and obtained a second
MSc Computer Science at Saarland University, Germany. Prior to coming to Buffalo, he was a full time researcher at
IFOMIS, Germany.
Shahid is implementing a prototype Referent Tracking System (RTS) as a client server application
where the server can communicate simultaneously with multiple Electronic Health Record clients running at remote locations.
The server is intended to be hosted by an institute which serves as hub for all clients. The server is composed of four
layers: a Web Server, the Core API, the Database layer and Reasoner layers which communicate with each other through
interfaces.
External collaborators
William R. Hogan, MD, MS is Chief and Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Biomedical Informatics with an MS in Intelligent Systems. Prior to joining UAMS, he was Director of Medical Vocabulary Services at UPMC and Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the creator of the Substance Intolerance Ontology and a co-developer of the Ontology for General Medical Science. His research interests in Referent Tracking include representing diseases, diagnoses, disorders, and pathological processes. Based on ideas articulated by Werner Ceusters, he is pioneering methods for generating realism-based representations of diseases and disorders from diagnostic statements encoded with terminologies and administrative classifications.
Naomi WRIGHTON is a PhD student at Aston
University, having taken voluntary redundancy from a principal lectureship
at Wolverhampton University, where she was mainly teaching software
Engineering and the
student support co-ordinator for the School of
Computing. She has a total of over 20 years teaching experience in
mathematics and software engineering, and over 10 years of industrial
experience as a programmer/analyst/software engineer. Of particular
relevance is two years as the computer programmer for the Health Care
Evaluation Research Team in Winchester.
Naomi is investigating the use of the
RTS API within the
GRIST data-gathering tool to
build an RTS repository and provide a suitable reasoning front-end to
this. She intends to evaluate this as part of her PhD.
