Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Prompt access to relevant clinical information is crucial when making healthcare decisions. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) promises better care by providing centralized access to different sources of data that make up the patient medical record. Such data includes the patient medical history, diagnostic reports from various care domains, images and other clinical data in electronic format. In addition to enabling timely access to relevant clinical information, EHR creates totally new opportunities for assisting in clinical tasks and for guiding medical decisions. As access to information originating from various sources is becoming possible, care decisions can be enhanced from information integration. Information integration aims to obtain a unified comprehensive view by integrating information that is extracted from data gathered at various sources. The extracted information needs to be semantically integrated, organized, and presented in order to help in the clinical investigations. On the other hand, with the EHR, the issue of data security has become increasingly important. Confidentiality needs to be ensured by controlling the access to personal health information as expressed by the patients' electronic consent. Within the framework of the proposed research program, we will explore a new access control framework based on the patients consent. We will also explore novel approaches for information integration, organization and presentation to help in information navigation. Furthermore, we will investigate innovative methods to identify and co-locate features from multi-modality images, such as X-rays and Magnetic Resonance Images, in order to assist in breast cancer assessment.