Florida State’s School of Information Assistant Professor Zhe He had the opportunity to attend the 16th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (MedInfo). This bi-annual event allows scientists, medical practitioners, entrepreneurs, and educators from around the world to share the world’s current research and foremost application in these fields.
Dr. He kept busy during the conference as he not only presented his paper “Perceiving the Usefulness of National Cancer Institute Metathesaurus for Enriching NCIt with Topological Patterns”, but also led a panel discussion on “Advancing Health Informatics Education and Health IT Workforce Development through Interdisciplinary Collaboration” along with 5 other panelists.
Dr. He’s paper focuses on a method that he has developed for identifying new medical concepts in a controlled terminology. In his new method He added an algorithmic aspect to evaluate candidate concepts and reject a well defined group of them. He used this method with the National Cancer Institute Metathesaurus to identify new concepts for the NCit
The panel led by Dr. He focused on introducing the landscape of health informatics education from a variety of sources. Dr. He discussed the health informatics training in library science and information studies programs, with a focus on the certificate program in the School of Information at Florida State University. He also talked about the newly established Interdisciplinary Medical Science Undergraduate Degree Program at FSU College of Medicine, in which iSchool’s Health IT Certificate is a major component. Dr. He also shared his experience working with information studies graduate students on health informatics research projects, developing graduate health informatics courses, and integrating research into health informatics classes.
With broad interests in biomedical and health informatics, clinical research informatics, knowledge discovery, and ontology-based data analytics Dr. He’s research offers telling information for the science community.