Department News
Annual Hackathon Focuses on New Tool Development
The 4th Annual Data Sciences Hackathon was hosted by the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS), Informatics Club, the UAB Biomedical Research Information Technology Enhancement Commons Program (U-BRITE), and the Center for Computational Genomics and Data Science (CGDS) over two days on August 5th-6th, providing attendees the opportunity to network with peers in the scientific community.
Read moreWhole-Genome Assembly Improved in Long-Read Sequencing
the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome. It will now replace the reference genome first
drafted in 2000 under the original Human Genome Project.
Read more
Informatics Receives Set-Aside Funds
The Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS) has received set-aside funds to collaborate with Boston Children’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School through Aug 2023 for cancer research, as part of the U24 Project “Cancer Deep Phenotype Extraction from Electronic Medical Records.”
With these funds, John Osborne, PhD, Assistant Professor at DBIDS and the O’Neal Cancer Control and Population Science Program, will oversee the installation of a Deep Cancer Phenotyping (DeepPhe) system, in collaboration with Dr. Gaurav Goyal, MD, Assistant Professor and oncologist at the O’Neal Cancer Center.
Read moreDBIDS Chair Speaks on State of Biomedical Informatics and Systemic Racism
James Cimino, MD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, provided a special presentation on biomedical informatics and systemic racism.
The presentation, entitled "Is Biomedical Informatics Abetting Systemic Racism?," examines how discriminatory behavior can creep into methods such as clinical guidelines, machine learning and automated clinical decision support, and provides a case study of clinical alerts in the UAB Hospital electronic medical record system.
Call for COVID-19 Biomedical Data Science Partnership
Dear Colleagues,
As the Associate Director of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS) and the program director of the U-BRITE Platform, I am announcing a special call for COVID-19 biomedical data science partnership with DBIDS, which will provide new biomedical informatics resources in our joint fight against COVID-19.
Read moreInformatics for Precision Medicine the Topic of Recent Informatics Conference at UAB
The original application of informatics in medicine was developing electronic health records and expert systems and enabling the use of data from across multiple systems to assist with research, clinical decision making and patient care.
“The field of informatics has evolved immensely from its original use,” said Jake Chen, Ph.D., Chief Bioinformatics Officer at the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS). “The next step in the evolution of informatics is the collaboration with precision medicine to solve complex clinical and treatment issues facing patients today. This collaboration is about using genomic information and data-driven informatics to build new analytic engines, or the ‘brain,’ of future healthcare,” Chen explained.
Read more