Michael J. Becich, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh, will serve as a senior consultant to Omnyx LLC, a new GE Healthcare/University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UMPC) venture that has the potential to transform surgical pathology though the use of a “virtual microscope.” GE Healthcare is a unit of the General Electric Company. Becich and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC began work over a decade ago to develop this technology, which is intended to improve the speed and accuracy of disease diagnosis.

“Currently, this technology is largely being used for education and training,” Becich recently told The Dark Report. “What will make the market explode is getting certification from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use these instruments for primary diagnosis. Getting the FDA to approve this technology as a medical device will allow pathologists to use imaging as the primary diagnostic mode in the same way radiologists look at images as part of their work flow.”

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A teaching proposal submitted by Heiko Spallek, DMD, PhD, assistant professor of dental medicine and biomedical informatics, and Mark Mooney, MS, PhD, professor and vice chair, Department of Oral Biology, School of Dental Medicine, was recently awarded funding to promote innovation in education. The award winners were selected by the Office of the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence (ACIE). The awards, begun in 2000 by James V. Maher, provost and senior vice chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh, encourage instructional innovation and teaching excellence. Spallek and Mooney’s proposal, one of 8 that was awarded funding, is titled, “Quantitative Image Analysis Using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended.”

For more information, see http://www.chronicle.pitt.edu/?p=1396

The research of Atul J. Butte, MD, PhD, was described in detail in the May 6, 2008 edition of the New York Times. Butte is an assistant professor of medicine, pediatrics, and (by courtesy) computer science at Stanford University, and is chair of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Biomedical Informatics External Advisory Board.

This article, “Redefining Disease, Genes and All,” is available for download (PDF, 820 Kb)

Steven Handler, MD, MS, CMD, has won the Junior Faculty (Clinical) award at the Department of Medicine’s Sixth Annual Research Day, held on May 8, 2008 at the University of Pittsburgh.

Handler’s poster was titled, “Assessing the Performance Characteristics of Signals Used by a Clinical Event Monitor to Detect Adverse Drug Reactions in the Nursing Home.”

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a common cause of morbidity and mortality in nursing homes. Computerized clinical event monitors (automated decision-support systems that provide feedback to healthcare professionals) have primarily been developed to automate the detection of potential ADRs in acute and ambulatory care settings. The purpose of Handler’s study was to determine the positive predictive values of signals specifically designed for use by a clinical event monitor to detect ADRs in the nursing home setting.

“The results,” said Handler, “suggest that adverse drug reactions can be detected in the nursing home setting with a high degree of accuracy using a clinical event monitor that employs a set of signals derived by expert consensus, and further refined by knowledge engineering.”

The Department Of Medicine’s Research Day showcases the work of young researchers from the Department of Medicine.

Handler is an assistant professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine, and has a secondary faculty appointment at the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Handler is also a doctoral fellow in the Pittsburgh Biomedical Informatics Training Program. He is the lead author of the recent paper “Consensus list of signals to detect potential adverse drug reactions in nursing homes” (Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, May 2008).

“Informatics in Public Health,” this year’s Donald A. B. Lindberg Lecture and Symposium sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), discussed informatics in surveillance, epidemic models and other aspects of public health practice. The symposium took place on Thursday, May 8 at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Donald A. B. Lindberg Lecture, “Real Time Biosurveillance: Into Maturity or Obscurity?” was presented by Leslie Lenert, MD, MS, director of the National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the NCPHI, Lenert is responsible for improving health practice through the advancement of the science of biomedical information systems. He is a member of the editorial boards of Medical Decision Making, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and Journal of Biomedical Informatics. He is also a member of the Agency for Health Research and Policy’s Healthcare Technology and Decision Sciences study section. In 2002, Lenert was appointed to the American College of Medical Informatics, in recognition of his work in the field of informatics.

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Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, PhD, a primary faculty member at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, is also serving as an affiliated faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh Center for ALS Research.

The Center for ALS Research integrates and coordinates research and clinical activities by investigators and clinicians in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and other motor neuron diseases. The Center, directed by Robert Bowser, PhD, includes a multidisciplinary clinic for patient care and numerous basic science laboratories searching for causes and treatments of ALS. The Center for ALS Research also administers the Stephen Tuttle ALS Tissue Donation Program, providing a resource for human tissue samples for ALS and control subjects for use in research both within the University of Pittsburgh and throughout the country.

Gopalakrishnan’s two-year research collaboration with Bowser involves cerebrospinal fluid profiling of ALS and with proteomic data mining of the mass spectra to identify disease-specific biomarkers. Gopalakrishnan’s long-term interests include learning of useful models for predicting disease onset and progression from integration of clinical information with genomic and proteomic markers.

A Pitt Innovator Award was presented to Gopalakrishnan in 2006 for successfully licensing technology developed in her (and Bruce Buchanan’s) laboratory to a biotech startup company in Pittsburgh called Knopp Neurosciences, Inc. that performs biomarker validation studies. The technology employs rule learning to discover potential disease-specific biomarkers from proteomic mass spectra.

Gopalakrishnan is an assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Gopalakrishnan has secondary appointments in the Intelligent Systems Program and the Department of Computational Biology. Her research encompasses the development and application of symbolic, probabilistic and hybrid machine learning techniques to the mining of structural and genomic databases in order to learn useful, robust models and associations. Gopalakrishnan is fundamentally interested in technologies that aid knowledge discovery by incorporating prior knowledge. Her current collaborative projects include modeling of protein sequence-structure-function relationships and identification of disease-specific proteomic biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases and lung cancer. Gopalakrishnan is the recipient of a five-year K25 Mentored Quantitative Research Career Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

For additional information, please see:

• The Center for ALS Research at the University of Pittsburgh (Web site): http://www.alsresearchcenter.org/
• Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, PhD (DBMI profile): http://www.dbmi.pitt.edu/fac/gopalakrishnan.html

From CAP Impact, Fall 2007

The CAP Foundation is pleased to announce that 29 applicants were approved to receive the Informatics Award to attend the APIII Conference in Pittsburgh in September, 2007. We are grateful to Michael Becich, MD, PhD, conference program director, for allowing a record number of Foundation grants to be given. Funding was provided by dbMotion, McKesson Solutions, Inc. GE Healthcare, PercipEnz Technologies, Inc., Aperio Technologies, Inc., Cerner Corporation, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, IMPAC Medical System, Misys-Healthcare Systems, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Those receiving this award are listed below:

Muhamad Sadek Almiski, MD, Wayne State University
Jeff Baily, MD, PhD, University Hospitals of Cleveland
Naima L. Carter-Monroe, MD, Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Medicine
Steven Catinchi-Jaime, MD, Conemaugh Valley Memorial Medical Center
Martin C. Chang, MD, PhD, Brigham & Women's Hospital
Jerome Cheng, MD, Suny Downstate Medical Center
Kenneth J. Craddock, MD, University of Toronto
Eric Duncavage, MD, Washington University
Marc P. Dupre, MD, University of Calgary
Gretchen Galliano, MD, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Erin Grimm, MD, University of Washington
Douglas J. Hartman, MD, University Hospitals Case Medical Center
Jeremy W. Henderson, MD, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Garnet Horne, MD, University of Calgary
Joy John Mammen, MD, Henry Ford Hospital
Dena Marrinucci, The Scripps Research Institute
Matthew A. Martin, MD, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Michael T. McBride, MD, University of Kentucky
Sambit Kumar Mohanty, MD, University of Pittsburgh
Mandy Flannery O'Leary, MD, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Hooman H. Rashidi, MD, Yale School of Medicine
Brian F. Roehmholdt, MD, Yale School of Medicine
Erez Shalom, M.Sc., Ben Gurion University Medical Informatics Research Center
Gaurav Sharma, MD, Henry Ford Hospital
Mike Toscano, MD, Emory University Hospital
Di Wang, MD, St. Barnabas Medical Center
Annie Yau, MD, University of Calgary
Woojin Matthew Yu, MD, Columbia University/Presbyterian Medical Center
Zhuang Zuo, MD, PhD, University of South Alabama

Randolph Miller (MD ’76, Internal Medicine Resident ’79) was a second-year med student – a physics major from Princeton University who knew how to program computers when he volunteered to help Pitt’s Jack Myers with a project in computer-assisted diagnostics. Today, Miller is the Donald A. B. and Mary M. Lindberg University Professor at Vanderbilt University and was recently elected to the Institute of Medicine.

“I was recruited here as chair of what became the Department of Biomedical Informatics,” he says, noting he has since stepped down. Now, he’s considering a return to his original work, trying to build a national model for computer-assisted diagnosis.

from PittMed Magazine, Winter 2008 edition

An interview with Richard A. Bankowitz, MD, MBA, vice president and medical director of Premier Healthcare Informatics. Bankowitz was one of the first NLM-funded biomedical informatics fellows at Pitt, and is also a former Pitt faculty member.

Read full interview in Physician’s News Digest.

Steven M. Handler, MD, MS, CMD, is the co-principal investigator on a $350,000 grant awarded by The Commonwealth Fund to study the availability and use of heath information technology (HIT) in nursing homes.

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