1 Clinical Decision Support and Knowledge Management Staff –Alan Rector or Format –Lecture demonstration, discussion, Web, and lab 1-2 lecture-demo sessions per week interspersed with lab work Assessment –Web searches and summary on a given topic 20% –Continuous assessment lab projects40% –Exam40% But you must pass the exam to pass the course!

2 Conferences –MEDINFO triennial –AMIA Fall Symposium (JAMIA) –MIE – Medical Informatics Europe –AIME – Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe Journals –Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) –Journal of Biomedical Computing (Computers in Biomedical Research) –Methods of information in Medicine –International Journal of Biomedical Computing –IEEE transactions on biomedical computing

3 Course Web Site Much of the course will use material from the web Part of your assessment will be to contribute to the web site Course Web Site (last year’s …/cds-2003) Medinfo Ontology Tutorial Bookmark the web site ASAP Look at the cds_links.htm file - it is also part of the handout.

4 Texts There just is no good single text –Readings to be distributed –Readings through web page –Handbook of Medical Informatics – See Web page “Good General Sites and Books” –Official texts – both badly out of date! Clinical Decision Support Systems: Theory and Practice Ed Berner ES. Ball MJ1 st Edition Jan 1988, Springer Verlag : ISBN Additional textEvaluation Methods in Medical Informatics Friedman CP, ed Wyatt JC, 1 st Edition Jan 1987, Springer Verlag : ISBN

5 Assessment details Web sites and review of a topic - Due Week 5: 20% Mini-project and Paper - Due final day of course: 40% –Something implemented in one of the tools –Ideal is “End to end” - not likely possible Exam - 90 minutes written paper: 40%

6 Goals of Module Understand the context of medical decision support, guidelines and protocols Understand the difficulty of compiling protocols. (The task of gathering the evidence for protocols via “systematic review” requires a separate module. Understand some of the difficulties in translating guidelines for human interpretation into computable form Basic understanding of some of the technologies used Basic understanding of the foundations required

7 Technologies & Tools Primary Technologies –Structured text guidelines - GemcutterGemcutter New version expected in March – currently sabotaged by Microsoft updates –Knowledge Representation and Ontologies Protégé-OWLProtégé –Rule based systems and Protocol Engines – Tallis/ ProForma / Protege –Belief Nets – Hugin or Netica ( –Object Oriented Design and UML - Universal Modelling Language - ArgoUML and HL7 RIM ArgoUML Supplementary technologies –XML - the underlying syntax for just about everything these days XML related technologies - at least to know their names XSLT, RDF, etc. Best source is (not w3school (singular) which is a commercial squatter)

8 Fundamental Knowledge Bayes theorem and utility theory –Enough to understand what makes good evidence and how evidence flows around a network –The difference between probability and expected utility Elementary formal logic –Enough to understand the underlying connections between Knowledge Representation, Rules Based Systems and Object Oriented Modelling Taught in half-hour a week mini-chunks plus problem sets

9 Plan for the Course Week 2 –Gemcutter (we hope) Week 3-6 –Knowledge Representation, Ontologies, Logic, Object Oriented Design, and UML Weeks 7-8 –Statistical Methods and Belief nets and Utility Weeks 9-10 –Formal Reasoning and ProForma (we hope) Week 11 –Review and catch up.

10 Feedback and Supplementary Material Up to you really Please me suggestions to add to the course web site.