6.872J-HST.950J  6.872J-HST.950J

Contemporary medical care requires health care providers (and patients and their families) to know a great deal about the diseases, genetic predispositions, signs and symptoms, treatments and medications of each individual.  To exploit the potential contributions of improvements in our understanding of genomics, proteomics and the “new biology,” we must combine such data with the clinical data that represent the patient’s phenotype. We must also develop new analytical methods to find the important relationships among these data, and then apply them in many settings to improve health care.

These needs form an intriguing engineering challenge described in this class, along with methods and practices aimed at their solution.

Topics:

• Contemporary Medical Care: Purpose, methods, organization

• Medical Data: Types, organization, presentation, uses

• Standards: Terminologies, coding, natural language processing

• Health Enterprise and National Infrastructures

• Privacy: Data de-identification & anonymization, geographic information, genetic data

• Public Health & Surveillance

• Telemedicine & Medicine in the Developing World

• Learning Graphical Models

• Analysis of Networks

• Statistical Signal Processing

• Temporal Inference Methods

• Information-Theoretic Metrics

• Bayesian Statistics

• Decision Support