Dr. Amar Das

Biography:
Dr. Amar Das is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a core faculty member of the Stanford Medical Informatics group. His research efforts focus on the advancement of model-driven architectures and Semantic Web technologies (XML, OWL, SWRL) to support temporal reasoning, data integration, and collaborative systems in healthcare and the life sciences. Dr. Das received his BA from Northwestern University and his MD and PhD degrees from Stanford University. Dr. Das has received awards for several of his scientific papers in medical informatics and also a Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Research Foundation Starter Award in Informatics.

Talk Title: Semantic Interoperability of Time-Oriented and Workflow Information among Clinical Trials Management Applications

Abstract: The increasing complexity of managing a clinical trial study creates an enormous requirement for integrating knowledge and information across all stages of a trial, including planning, documentation, implementation, and analysis. We have created a knowledge-based framework (called Epoch) to support semantic interoperability among software applications that support clinical trials management. In collaboration with the Immune Tolerance Network, a national clinical research organization, we are currently targeting two application areas that require the representation and analysis of time-oriented and workflow data: (1) tracking study participants as they advance through the trials, and (2) tracking biological specimens as they are processed at the trial laboratories. We will discuss a set of ontologies and methods that we have developed to configure such software applications and to allow mappings to the temporal information that they collect.