Project Proposed: This project, from an EPSCoR state and a non-PhD granting institution, acquiring a high performance computational infrastructure to be located at U. of Tennessee, Chattanooga (UTC), aims to support, as a shared facility, five research projects involving ten investigators and 18 students (9 UG, 6 MSc and 3PhD). The proposed projects explore three requirements for a viable, productive and usable health information technology. The project addresses the need to - Retrieve relevant information from biomedical data, with accuracy and security; - Analyze the data; and - Disseminate and share the data. Biomedical records hold enormous amounts of multimodal data. Thus, the research efforts described focus on actions needed to make this data available (complete, secure, and reliable). The proposed research questions are organized into three main thrust areas: How to - Discover clinically and biomedically important knowledge from complex biomedical multimedia data; - Evaluate and improve the quality and safety of health care by analyzing the large amount of clinical data; and - Facilitate the biomedical information collection, management, exchange, and analysis with large-scale network computing platforms and telemedicine systems. The computational infrastructure is expected to serve as an essential shared research instrument, allowing researchers to analyze, design, develop, test, and deploy large-scale and distributed computer algorithms to address a variety of computationally-intensive and data-intensive biomedical informatics research challenges. Broader Impacts: Due to a large potential number of users, its convincing educational plan, outreach plan, as well as expected scientific discoveries in a very important area for every society: health care, this work exhibits potential for strong broader impacts. The programs to enrich broader impact aspects will not only be felt locally, but also internationally, and help to ensure that the country maintains leadership and innovation within the addressed research domains.
