Research projects in Information Technology

A PhD scholarship is available as part of an exciting research collaboration between the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences (MNHS) and indigenous communities in rural Victoria.

Critical work to the future of healthcare ... exploring the role of #FHIR in interoperability and #datascience

Also allowing exploration and usage of the #SMART on #FHIR software paradigm 

Involves working with various real world health services and health IT partners 

#digitalhealth #health #EMR #hospital #software

We are living in the era of the 4th industrial revolution through the use of cyber physical systems. Data Science has revolutionised the way we do things, including our practice in healthcare. Application of artificial intelligence/machine learning to the big data from genetics and omics is well recognized in healthcare, however, its application to the data reported everyday as part of the clinical laboratory testing environment for improvement of patient care is under-utilized. 

With success stories ranging from speech recognition to self-driving cars, machine learning (ML) has been one of the most impactful areas of computer science. ML’s versatility stems from the wealth of techniques it offers, making ML seem an excellent tool for any task that involves building a model from data. Nevertheless, ML makes an implicit overarching assumption that severely limits its applicability to a broad class of critical domains: the data owner is willing to disclose the data to the model builder/holder.

We have a range of potential research projects on offer in partnership with VIFM - https://www.vifm.org/ - looking at ML techniques in predicting forensic diagnoses  / image analysis, across multiple data types found at VIFM. These include atomic data, text data and text documents, medical images, clinical photographs and digital pathology slides. 

This research has high potential to support our IT for social good agenda in addition to its technical attractiveness. 

This project could suit a candidate with a background in the socio-technical area of IM or IT, or could be tackled from a range of technical perspectives.

One example of the kind of work a suitable candidate could undertake is in support of the NEED collaboration - which at the Australian end is being run out of FIT. In the NEED setting, questions of inequity in healthcare and wellness act as the starting point for considering digital health opportunities and solutions. 

This project is technical in nature and would suit a candidate with a background and interest in web programming, health informatics or health data (or a combination thereof).

One potential area of exploration for the candidate is extending the work on Pathling (developed by the CSIRO).

Another area demanding further investigation and research is that of dynamic and extensible clinical decision support through CDS Hooks.

#digitalhealth #health #FHIR #interoperability #software #EMR #CDS

This project is technical in nature and would suit a candidate with a background and interest in #Java programming, health informatics or health data (or a combination thereof).

The primary aim of this work is the extend and localise (to the Australian context) the open source Synthea stack. #Synthea is a very valuable tool in health IT R and D and in health data research.

#digitalhealth #FHIR #synthetic #healthdata #data #hospital 

Networked digital diagnostic, monitoring and patient treatment tools permeate medical practice. A plethora of telemedicine, national and other eHealth records, injury assessment, patient-specific devices, hospital theatre equipment tools have resulted in a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide.  Research suggests the application of these tools  to healthcare can improve clinical workflows and patient care outcomes.

The rise of technology that supports a partnership between user and computer highlights an opportunity for a new era of “human-computer integration”, contrasting the previously dominant paradigm of computers functioning as tools.