Medical informatics (also called Health Information Systems, health-care informatics, health informatics, clinical informatics, or biomedical informatics) is a discipline at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include computers, clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. It is applied to the areas of nursing, clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, occupational therapy, and biomedical research.
Imaging Informatics
Imaging Informatics, also known as Radiology Informatics or Medical Imaging Informatics, aims to improve the efficiency, accuracy, usability and reliability of medical imaging services within the healthcare enterprise. It is devoted to the study of how information about and contained within medical images is retrieved, analyzed, enhanced, and exchanged throughout the medical enterprise.
As radiology is an inherently data-intensive and technology-driven specialty of medicine, radiologists have become leaders in Imaging Informatics. However, with the proliferation of digitized images across the practice of medicine to include fields such as cardiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, surgery, gastroenterology, obstetrics, gynecology and pathology, the advances in Imaging Informatics are also being tested and applied in other areas of medicine.
Associated faculty:
- Usha Sinha (SDSU Physics)
- Sunil Kumar (SDSU Electrical Engineering)
- Yusuf Ozturk (SDSU Electrical Engineering)
Public Health Informatics
Public Health Informatics has been defined as the systematic application of information and computer science and technology to public health practice, research, and learning.
The need to extract usable public health information from the mass of data available requires the public health informaticist to become familiar with a range of analysis tools, ranging from business intelligence tools to produce routine or ad hoc reports, to sophisticated statistical analysis tools such as DAP/SAS and PSPP/SPSS, to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to expose the geographical dimension of public health trends.
Associated faculty:
- Faramarz Valafar (SDSU School of Public Health)
Nursing Informatics
Nursing informatics involves software that can help manage and communicate patient information.
Decision Systems
A medical decision system is interactive decision support system (DSS) computer software designed to assist physicians and other health professionals with decision making tasks, such as determining diagnosis of patient data. It is a major topic of artificial intelligence in medicine.
Associated faculty:
- Sunil Kumar (SDSU Electrical Engineering)
- Yusuf Ozturk (SDSU Electrical Engineering)
- Richard Levine (SDSU Mathematics & Statistics)
- Juanjuan Fan (SDSU Mathematics & Statistics)
- Jianwei Chen (SDSU Mathematics & Statistics)
