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, and Director of the Ontology Research Group of
the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.
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.
Will Hsu is a PhD student in Neuroscience in UB’s School for Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (SMBS), and has a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Psychology from UB’s School of Arts and Sciences. Driven by interdisciplinary interests in how mind and body interact, he began his research training as a research scholar in the Child and Family Asthma Studies Center of WCHOB in 2002. There he was trained in the collection and analysis of physiological reactivity data from asthmatic children placed under laboratory stress protocols. He has also taken a major role in constructing, converging and maintaining physiological, psychological, and medical databases from paper charts to electronic formats. In 2006, he sought out to advance his fundamental knowledge by becoming a graduate student in basic sciences and by seeking advanced training in single-neuron electrophysiological recording. He also has begun to expand his background in Medical/Health Informatics by undertaking study in the SMBS certification program. Currently he is interested in investigating the psychobiological effects of emotional stress on children with asthma and obesity.
His research activities also include the development of application ontologies for the
OPMQoL project.
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.
Kristina Doing-Harris, PhD, has a PhD in Cognitive Modeling, an MS in Information Technology and an MA in Psychology from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. In 2009 she updated her Computer Science credentials by earning a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah. At that point, she entered the field of Biomedical Informatics. The first projects she worked on consisted of a computer assisted update (CAU) website and a wiki for the
Consumer Health Vocabulary. She is currently an NLM funded post-doctoral researcher in
BMI. She is involved in projects at the University of Utah and the Veteran’s Health Administration. These projects are related to the communication patterns between health care providers, identification and retrieval of functional status information and identification of information pertaining to Medically Unexplained Syndromes in medical records. She is in the process of ontology creation for the
project on Medically Unexplained Syndromes. This work will then inform ontology creation for functional status information.
Paola Russo, MD, studied internal medicine and is since 2011 a PhD student in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics at the University of Pavia, Italy. From 2004 to 2011, she worked at the Amyloidosis Center of the I.R.C.C.S. Policlinico San Matteo Foundation of Pavia, where she was in charge both of routine and research clinical activity, with particular interests in clinical trials. Her research interests during the PhD course, held at the Laboratory for Biomedical Informatics "Mario Stefanelli" (
BMI), include the development of an ontology representing the reality concerning systemic amyloidoses for application in the
SMART-Amy project.
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 implemented 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.
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.
