Department of Health Informatics
From the Head of the Department
All of our lives are touched by medicine and technology, but few of us understand the diversity of ways these fields help us. Recognizing the need to application of cutting-edge technology in the health sector, the Department of Health Informatics was established at METU in 2003, which has Medical Informatics master and doctorate programs. In 2006, Bioinformatics master program was introduced. Since the beginning, the Department's focus has been on education and research. The mission of the Department is to reform medical systems and make social contribution, by applying information technology to medicine, and to improve health services through information systems in both the private and public sectors of the healthcare and public health systems. To accomplish this mission, the Department assumes three major responsibilities:
- To train the next generation of academicians / researchers and to bring together researchers from other disciplines to the Health Informatics field.
- To promote and conduct interdisciplinary scientific research, with the purpose of broadening health informatics knowledge.
- To serve health informatics professionals and consumers by participating in relevant professional societies, editorial boards, and continuing education programs, while maintaining the position of health informatics leadership in the community.
- Our students gain knowledge of the scholarly health informatics literature and the application requirements of specific areas within medicine and/or biology.
Research at the Department of Health Informatics is focused on the development of methods, algorithms, and software systems for computer-aided diagnosis, therapy and training. Some of the focus areas are medical image processing, neuroimaging, virtual reality environments, as well as data mining. Due to the increasing momentum in basic sciences, studies in the fields of bioinformatics and neuroscience have recently been introduced to the curriculum.
Warmest regards,
Nazife Baykal
What is Health Informatics?
Health sciences and medicine are prominent application areas of information and technology. Measurement and imaging methods, testing, analysis and patient monitoring instruments are developing and increasing at a very fast pace. As a result, not only patient data is increasing at a very fast rate but also health information is getting richer. The contribution of information technologies in putting the research results to practice is indispensable, considering the expanding pace of research conducted in medicine.
The main motivation in Health Informatics lies in the forming, shaping and sharing of this information effectively and providing new methodologies in the diagnosis and treatment of patients. This is why; the biggest step that Turkey should take in Health Informatics is to start training specialists.
In addition, the analysis and synthesis of advancements in all areas of science, especially neuroscience, have always been on the agenda of Health Informatics. This is crucial for interdisciplinary approaches, combining the knowledge in several fields such as neurology, neuroradiology, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, biophysics, neuroimaging, neuropsychology and neurobiology. It is also necessary to establish shared and reusable processes, and to carry these processes into inter-institutional dimension with the help of information technologies.
In recent years, biomedical informatics has come into use as a name encompassing the converging fields of medical informatics and bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field spanning different areas of science, engineering, and mathematics. In particular, Bioinformatics lies at the interface of the traditional disciplines of Biology, Computer Science and Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Chemistry, and Physics. Recent advances in life sciences, such as the completion of the Human Genome Project, led to the generation of massive data sets that require the development of sophisticated computational analysis tools. With the help of the analysis tools and new mathematical models, the genetic code of living organisms is being deciphered and the integrated functions of thousands of genes are being discovered. Our understanding of the natural world is dramatically changing with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of human life.
Health Informatics at METU
The Health Informatics department was established in 2003 with the cooperation of METU and Hacettepe University, leading to the initiation of Medical Informatics master and doctorate programs. The Medical Informatics program is the first doctorate program in this field in Turkey. Later in 2006, the Bioinformatics master program was established.
The department develops basic methods that are applicable to medical information systems in the areas of healthcare and information science, establishes infrastructures for the information environment where medical information is utilized effectively, and applies knowledge and technique acquired through these efforts to basic medical sciences and healthcare. The main keywords of the target domain are medical and clinical information systems, next-generation electronic health record systems, virtual health care environment, computer representations and standardization of medical concepts, ontology, medical knowledge engineering, hospital epidemiology, quality assessment of healthcare, clinical and bioinformatics engineering, privacy protection and encryption, analysis of hospital management, safety management in healthcare, neuroscience and neuroimaging.
