Areas of Research
Standardization of Electronic Health Records
Health informatics standards represent an essential prerequisite of open distributed systems of electronic health records. The aim of this field of investigation is to track the corresponding standardization activities of the different standardization committees, to analyze the published models and standards, and to investigate their practical use. Special attention is laid on the aspect of semantically interoperable health information exchange, which enables communicating systems to semantically interpret and thus to process received information adequately.
Information Retrieval
Intra- as well as cross-organizational health information can be a valuable source for different kinds of queries. Patient-related queries can for example be applied in the course of a patient encounter by a healthcare provider to filter the relevant content from the volume of data. Cross-patient queries help to gain knowledge for clinical research, medical quality management, health reporting, and epidemiology.
Reuse of Health Information
The aim of this field of investigation is to utilize available health information, e. g. from medical routine, reimbursement, or from clinical studies for the purpose of research. The change of the original context of the information entails several challenges to be solved, e. g. in the areas of data protection, retrieval-oriented design, data integration, and complex data analyses.
Visual Data Analysis and Image Processing in Medicine
Hereby methods are developed for the automatic processing of medical image and video data. Goals are amongst others the automatic detection of content and its morphometric assessment, as well as the visualization of relevant information inherent in image and video data in suitable form for the human eye. Another focus is the design of methods for efficient health information exchange, which allow access to medical media.