REU Site: MedIX: MEDical Informatics eXperiences in undergraduate research Principal Investigators for DePaul University: Daniela Raicu and Jacob Furst Principal Investigator for Northwestern University: David Channin, MD Principal Investigator for University of Chicago: Samuel Armato, PhD
The Medical Informatics (MedIX) program?s main objectives are to encourage talented undergraduates to pursue graduate education and to expose students to interdisciplinary research, especially at the border of information technology and medicine. All of the projects on which students will work are inspired by state- of-the-art research questions in imaging informatics. Students will work as part of faculty-undergraduate teams on new problems ranging from traditional image processing (e.g. liver segmentation and computer-aided diagnosis, breast density assessment for cancer detection) to structured reporting and natural language processing of radiology reports, to workflow and process re-engineering to the application of data mining and ontology-based means for image annotation and markup (e.g. lung nodule detection and interpretation). Ultimately, each project has the long-term potential to increase the quality of healthcare available to people everywhere. Faculty mentors will conduct tutorials on imaging informatics, conduct biweekly meetings of students and mentors, and create an environment that will expose students to all phases of research and graduate school. Students will participate in defining the direction of their research, give presentations to the group as well as other audiences, write up and publish research results in the format of a conference or journal article, and participate in relevant conferences. The MedIX REU site will run for three summers, with ten student participants doing research ten weeks each summer under the supervision of five mentors dedicated to undergraduate research. The site will be hosted by three interdisciplinary laboratories: the Medical Informatics Laboratory at DePaul University, the Imaging Informatics Laboratory at Northwestern University, and the Imaging Research Institute at the University of Chicago; the research environment will offer the students the opportunity to interact with computer scientists, medical physicists, and medical doctors. More information on the MedIX program can be found at http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/research/vc/medix
