We kindly invite students who are interested in Medical Informatics,
in particular in Protocol-Based Care, Process Modeling, and evidence-based
Medicine, as well as in Artificial Intelligence and Information and
Knowledge Engineering (Information Extraction, Transformation, Integration,
and Retrieval), to apply for a PhD researcher position.
The position, under the supervision of Prof. Silvia Miksch, is available
at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems within
the Information Engineering group and will enlarge the Asgaard project
group.
The position within the newly granted project entitled Facilitating
Evidence-based Decision Support Using Information Extraction and Clinical
Guidelines - EviX is available starting July 2006 for 2.5 years. The
income is 23,545.20 EURO including tax each year (approx. 17,118.60
EURO after tax reduction).
Information about the project
The goal of the proposed project is the experimental application and
further development of promising approaches in the area of semi-automatic
creation of computer-interpretable clinical guidelines and the execution
of evidence-based recommendations. We expect contributions to ease
the creation of computer-interpretable guidelines and support of the
medical staff in their daily routine and decision-making.
Computer-interpretable guidelines ought to support the medical staff
in treatment planning and execution and promulgate the most effective
and efficient care. Due to the complexity of most of the guideline
representation languages the transformation into these languages is
a very complex and cumbersome task. In the same way, embedding of
evidence-based treatment recommendations is important, but such concepts
are inadequately incorporated in currently existing representation
languages. Consequently, these aspects are not considered during the
execution and decision-making process.
In previous projects we developed a set of methods and programs for
creating and executing treatment plans as well as to visualize them.
In the proposed project we will use these methods to point out, improve,
and augment methods to solve the problems mentioned above. Within
this interdisciplinary project we build upon extensive existing contacts
to developers of clinical guidelines as well as to developers of computer-interpretable
guideline representation languages (e.g., PROforma).
Both the medical discipline and the computer science discipline will
be enriched by the proposed project. On the one hand, the developed
methods and applications will influence the development of guidelines
and probably will contribute to the development of repositories for
computer-interpretable guideline representation languages as well
as to better support the decision making process in treatment planning.
On the other hand, methods of Information Extraction and Integration
are extended and evaluated.
Role of the position
- Applying Information Extraction techniques to detect both graded
and ungraded evidence-based recommendations in the text documents
- Emphasis importance of evidence recommendations: development and
implementation of rules for implementing decision strategies
Required education/skills
You are a university graduate (at the diploma or master of science
level) in Computer Science, Medical Informatics, or Information Systems.
You have programming experience in Java and you should be fluent in
the English language and eager to communicate your work both orally
and in written form.
How to apply
Please send your application with full CV (including list of subjects
taken at university plus your grades, publications, preferred research
direction, etc.) to Katharina Kaiser (kaiser
@ ifs.tuwien.ac.at) until March 1, 2006.
