The Medical Informatics (MedIX) program is hosted by the Medical Informatics Laboratory at DePaul University and the Imaging Research Institute at the University of Chicago. The program runs for three summers, with eight students doing research for ten weeks each summer under the supervision of four dedicated and experienced mentors. The MedIX program aims to 1) encourage talented undergraduates to pursue graduate education, especially undergraduates underrepresented in information technology, and b) expose students to interdisciplinary research, especially at the border of information technology and medicine. All of the students' projects are inspired by state-of-the-art research ideas in imaging informatics and by novel data mining and computer vision algorithms that these research ideas require in order to be realized in practice. Ultimately, each project has the long-term potential to increase the quality of healthcare available to people everywhere.
Faculty will conduct tutorials, lectures, and demonstrations on imaging informatics, require frequent presentations of student work, encourage students to publish, and conduct biweekly meetings of students, mentors, and teams. Students work as part of faculty-undergraduate teams on new problems; they participate in defining the direction of their research, and they are strongly encouraged to publish meaningful results. The intended impact is to continue the increase in enrollment of undergraduates into graduate school, especially with respect to underrepresented students and interdisciplinary research. Further, the emphasis on recruiting underrepresented populations can ultimately help improve the diversity of university faculty in information technology and medical informatics.
