When Prof. Lee decided to attend the AMIA 2019, the annual symposium sponsored by the American Medical Informatics Association, which was held on November 16-20, in Washington DC, USA, he had two objectives in mind. First, Prof. Lee wanted to get an overview of the impending issues and emerging research topics in the field. Second, he wanted to get some insights how those issues and research topics could meld with those at CCADD such that it may adjust, refine, expand, or even cross the border of what it used to day to day in the form of research and project. 

Did Prof. Lee successfully achieve his objectives? Pretty much. Carefully, but rather passively watching and observing what’s happening now in the medical informatics field, which is rather unusual for him, who used to be quite vocal and involving, Prof. Lee realized again that technology may come and go, but the domain doesn’t. It was a pleasant reaffirmation of his longstanding belief. The speakers and audience always emphasized why, rather than how, they did this or that although they were not shy at all of delving into technical complexities when necessary. This AMIA’s ‘put-patients-first’ philosophy was also highlighted by Dr. Tetteh‘s opening keynote speech, who stressed ‘human care’. Wasn’t this the least likely talk that one could expect to hear at an informatics conference? Oh, by the way, Dr. Tetteh is the Chief Medical Information Officer for the US Navy. The audience wholeheartedly responded to Dr. Tetteh’s speech by standing ovation.     

This was very much enlightening to Prof. Lee, given that KOSMI 2019 he had joined just a couple weeks before in Korea was too much packed with technical dudes, who boasted how skillful and advanced they were while failing to or faintly paying due attention to patients, medicine, and the domain. For example, the electronic medical records (EMR) is a great way and tool. But, do we have any evidence that EMR has improved patient outcomes? Has EMR enabled physicians for analyzing patient data more efficiently, assisting them to make better decisions? Not quite so.  

But, don’t get Prof. Lee wrong! Technology is important. “The more we care about the domain, the more we should be fully cognizant of and conversant in the technology”, Prof. Lee spoke up. “What matters, however, is not to lose our perspectives and reasons why we are doing this in the maze of technological overloads”, he added. This understanding led Prof. Lee to his next question. “Have we arrived at a point that encourages CCADD to rethink about its direction?” “Is the timing right?” 

Not sure yet, frankly speaking. However, one thing is clear. CCADD should not postpone asking themselves those questions!   

The 2019 fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), organized by Kyungpook National University Hospital (KNUH), was held November 8-9, 2019, at the Global Plaza, Kyunpook National University, Daegu. Prof. Howard Lee, Yoomin Jeon and Junsik Moon participated in the conference.

The conference presented 19 symposia, 6 oral presentation sessions of pre-selected paper submissions, and 3 tutorials in healthcare information, pharmaceutical and big data research which focused on analysis, application and standardization of data based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Sharing research ideas and analysis techniques, the attendees had an in-depth discussion on emerging issues and utilization in the fields of medical informatics.

On the second day, Prof. Lee chaired one of the oral presentation sessions entitled "New Drug and Pharmacovigilance", where he stressed full understanding of the research domain by communicating with experts in each research field. On the other hand, Yoomin presented two posters titled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to Increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment Using Electronic Medical Records' and 'A CDM-based Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of SGLT2 Inhibitors as Add-on Treatment in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus on Metformin, Sulfonylurea and/or DPP-4 Inhibitors'. Yoomin's poster presentations were well received.

Through the conference, the three members of CCADD were delighted to get introduced to the leading academicians and industry experts in the field of medical informatics. Furthermore, Prof. Lee and two CCADD members had a fun discussion that helped them look deeply into their current activities and direction of future research. Their collected insights out of the conference will be further discussed at the upcoming year-end workshop in early December.

Five CCADD members (Prof. Howard Lee, Dr. Soohyun Kim, Yoomin Jeon, Tae Chung, Serin Lee) have attended the Fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI) held at Chonbuk National University on November 22-23, 2018. The theme of the conference was 'Real World Data to optimize clinical trials', which reflects a growing role and value of big data and artificial intelligence for clinical trials. Over 700 people from academia, public institutions, and the pharmaceutical industry gathered to share their experiences, practices, insights, and perspectives on the more active use of data and information sciences in clinical trials.

Prof. Howard Lee spoke about AI-based patient recruitment in clinical trial in an invited session, entitled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment using Electronic Medical Records(EMR)'. Prof. Lee emphasized the application of AI technology to clinical trial feasibility such as feature selection algorithms in machine learning to identify common sensitive eligibility features (cSEFs). 

Yoomin Jeon and Tae Chung presented a poster at the conference too. Yoomin's poster was about the actual application of what Prof. Lee introduced in his talk. Tae examined the extent of mapping of ICD-10 to MeSH to crosswalk and synchronize different terms collected from different data sources. (Analysis of agreement status between the diagnostic code of MeSH and ICD-10).

Meanwhile, Dr. Soohyun Kim led a tutorial session, where she taught several essential statistical methods for biomedical informatics research using R. 

For more details, you may want to contact Yoomin Jeon or Tae Chung.

Many of CCADD members have attended the Spring Conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), held at Samsung Medical Comprehensive Cancer Center on June 14-15, 2018. Reflecting the recent drastic increase in the demand and importance of data science in health sciences, the theme of the conference was 'Evolving Data for Better Health'. More than 600 researchers, practitioners, and vendors in health informatics gathered together to share their knowledge, experience, results of research, and expertise through a series of keynote speeches, symposia, oral/poster presentations, and exhibitions.

Four abstracts by CCADD were accepted for poster presentation. Yoomin Jeon proposed a new approach to transform clinical trials eligibility criteria (EC, free-text) into structured data using the OMOP-CDM(Feasibility of Using the OMOP Common Data Model to Assess Clinical Trial Feasibility). She found that >75% of the EC could be mapped by the proposed approach, and the most important data group was condition.

Serin Lee, a student intern, gave her poster presentation entitled 'Dimensionality Reduction Model for Common Eligibility Criteria to effectively use Electronic Medical Record: A Pilot Study.' She proposed a dimensionality reduction model for common eligibility features (CEFs) based on ontology and semantic features of EC to reasonably compose the concept sets.

Dr. Soohyun Kim proposed a new type of command data model for clinical trials (Clinical Trial Common Data Model, CT-CDM) to support decision-making processes in clinical trials, entitled 'CDISC-based Common Data Model for Developing an Integrated Decision-Support System in Clinical Trials'. This command data model fully complies with the standards of Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium(CDISC) as a global, platform-independent data standard guaranteeing system interoperability. 

Lastly, but not the least, Dr. Jeong-An Gim shared his research findings: Application of Machine Learning Technology to Classify Healthy Subjects into Different Pharmacokinetic Exposure Groups to Tacrolimus. Using the decision-tree approach employed in R, Dr. Gim aimed to identify SNPs that are associated with the exposure to tacrolimus. The rs776746 in the CYP3A5 gene was the most influential mutation.

More detailed research findings can be downloaded below.

Much to everyone's delighted surprise, Serin Lee won an external solid-state drive of 1TB at the raffle draw! Since Serin will graduate in August, the prize was certainly a nice present.