The Bio-Health Informatics Group

Andy Brass (andy.brass@manchester.ac.uk)Robert Stevens (

robert.stevens@manchester.ac.uk)

IntroductionThese are exciting times in biology and medicine.

The genomics revolution is opening up whole new areas of research - from new insights into how organisms function, to new understandings of disease and disease processes.

Medicine is currently involved in the largest and most ambitious IT project in the world - the capture and interpretation of electronic patient records. This information will make health care much more effective and can help spot new diseases early - whilst they can still be contained and controlled.

At the heart of all these developments are data and knowledge - and a real need and demand for the skills and techniques that computer scientists can bring these problem areas.

Biology and healthcare now provide some of the fastest growing and most challenging areas for computer scientists to apply their skills.

“A decade after the human-genome project, biological science is poised on the edge of something wonderful “

Geoffrey Carr in the Economist. June 2010

“3 billion bases, thousands of differences, one that matters – who you gonna call... “

Clinical bioinformatician!

Data science with data from biology and health care

• Data Science: Extracting meaning from data that can be large, complex, distributed and dynamic

• Touches issues in machine learning, knowledge representation and high-performance computing, and .....

• For us the application domain is bio-health data and process

Humanities

Data

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Phar

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NHS

BHIG’s Connections

IMG

MLOAIGTM

Archaeology

FLS

FMHS

BHIG

Affiliated Members

• Sophia Ananiadou• Carole Goble• Caroline Jay• Goran Nenadic• Bijan Parsia• Steve Pettifer

Current Students

• Sahel – genome security (Social Science)• Muhammed – data mining GP data (AZ, pharmacy)• Oscar – reproducibility and parasites (FLS)• Muhannad - falls detection in the elderly (nursing, Herc)• Iliada – agile practice in the NHS (NHS)• Geraint – text mining bioinformatics (FLS)• Michael – inflammatory bowel biomarkers (FLS, industry)• Gurdeep – intestinal microbiome (FLS)• Ahmad – archaeoinformatics (archaeology)• Jose – modelling TF networks (FLS)

A virtuous circle

Issues in Computer

Science

Issues in Biology and

Health

Possible tasters and Ph.D. projects

• Making sense of 100,000 genomes for clinical care• Agile practice in the NHS• Big data approaches to GP data• Machine learning for cancer biomarkers• Challenge of reproducibility• Extracting and representing specific computational biology

methods from text• Representing and reasoning about the anatomy of plants in

first order logic• Cost models for ontology engineering methods• Methods for extracting meaning from health records