Health Informatics

Where we are now, and where we may be going

Professor Michael Brady FRS FREng

Department of Engineering Science
Oxford University

Hilary Term 2004

 Informatics

Informatics is an emerging discipline that has been

defined as the study, invention, and implementation
of structures and algorithms to improve
communication, interpretation, understanding and
management of information in order to help solve
application-specific problems

In our case, the application is healthcare

 Quite a new course!
• Changes to C4B
– Medical image analysis Î C6C
– Expert systems/AI temporarily “retired”
• I believe there’s a need for such a course!
– Software systems are the most complex
humanly-engineering artefacts in the world!
– Why medicine?
 Fundamental observation
• IT is increasingly pervasive in healthcare delivery (and
other complex applications)
• As more imaging and signal modalities become available
to clinicians, communications become faster, and
computers more powerful, doctors are drowning in data;
but what they want is information to guide patient
management.
• To do this, systems need to become smarter. Here we
examine two currently complementary (though
fundamentally linked) aspects to achieving this:
– Systems capable of reasoning, understanding & offering advice
– Systems capable of analysing signals and images
 Synopsis
1. Introduction & rationale
2. eScience & the Grid
3. Making systems intelligent: AI
4. Intelligent inference systems
5. Image segmentation
6. Shape & measurement
7. Image registration & fusion
8. Molecular medicine
 Modern Healthcare
• Continuing surge in knowledge about medicine
– New ways to diagnose, treat and cure disease
• Continuing ignorance
– Mental illness, stroke management, arthritis
– Malaria & other tropical diseases
– Detect early/cure heart disease and cancer
• Ageing population
– Life expectancy (in the West) is increasing
– The body is already outliving the brain
• Social, political, economic challenges
– Irrespective of political leaning, healthcare costs are dominating
western economies
– Expectation vs reality
– developed and undeveloped worlds
“medicine is a humanly impossible
task”
• “It is now humanly impossible for unaided
healthcare professionals to deliver patient care
with the efficacy, consistency and safety that the
full range of current knowledge could support”
http://www.openclinical.org/
• Exponential growth in knowledge and
techniques, eg over past 20 years:
– New imaging modalities CT, MRI, PET, fMRI, MEG
– Entirely new drug therapies, particularly for cancer
and brain disease
– Molecular medicine
 Staying abreast
• Doctors are already working to their limits,
and beyond, never mind staying abreast
• Continuing education is vital yet
requirements are spotty compared to the
USA
 Concentration of expertise
• As knowledge becomes deeper and
broader, expertise is becoming more
widely distributed
• ‘Twas ever thus
– large teaching centres in UK, USA, France, …
– postcode medicine
• Trend has accelerated
• Example: mammography in the USA
 Population expectations
• Less and less prepared to accept, without
challenge, expert pronouncements
• Press reports fuel expectation of average
treatment that cannot be satisfied by NHS,
particularly for a greying population
• More people expect more, high quality
treatment, want to participate in management of
their condition, want access to specialised
knowledge, and they want it now!
 Patient management
• Increasingly a team process
– Multidimensional meeting
– Dialogue of the “hard of hearing”
• The team is increasingly distributed widely
• The team is increasingly a Virtual
Organisation
• The timescales are shortening
• While medicine is becoming ever more
complex
Patient management = a highly and increasingly complex example of
business-on-demand
Health Informatics is changing
• Move to evidence-based medicine
– Reasoning becomes explicit
– Based on signals, images, clinical signs, …
– (team-based) decision making under uncertainty
• Treatment of disease to anticipation of disease
– Early diagnosis Æ better prognosis
– Prophylactic medicine – the positive role of insurance
companies
• Opportunities arising from genomics (and
proteomics) to detect and unravel individual variation,
stratify patients into disease and treatment groups
– “Personalised medicines”
 Information Technology
assumptions
• Moore’s law* will continue, at least for a while
– *Processing power doubles every 18 months
– 10 years = 6 doubles = 250Xpower of today’s computers at
comparable cost
• Ubiquitous computers
– Palm tops have 20 X power&memory of the computers I
used for robotics research 10 years ago
• Ubiquitous comms
– Blue tooth to PACS to the GRID
• Grids will become a major force
– National & International “virtual organisations” eg BIRN
• Improving software methodologies, large systems
• Increasingly intelligent software, based on AI methods
• Health professionals will be increasingly IT literate
– IT devices will be used
– IT devices will replace paper & pencil

Image courtesy Prof Richard Kitney, Imperial

 Current reality of health
informatics is very different…
• Predominantly visualisation, little analysis
– Registration (CT-PET), overwhelmingly rigid
– Predominantly manual segmentation
– Shape analysis is virtually non-existent
3D visualisation CT virtual colonoscopy
 Current reality of health
informatics is very different …
• Predominantly visualisation, little analysis
– Registration (CT-PET), overwhelmingly rigid
– Predominantly manual segmentation
– Shape analysis is virtually non-existent
• Intensive therapy units are intensively staffed
• PACS* – but images only, text separately
• Patient records and BNF on screen for primary
physicians
• Teleradiology doesn’t exist
• No fielded AI systems
• Surgery has been largely unaffected by Informatics
– few planning systems, no post-surgical prediction,
...
• Industry is conservative
*picture archiving and communication systems
 From Internet to eScience & the
Grid
• Networked computers
• Internet
• Limitations of the Internet Î the Grid
• Main features of the emerging Grid
• Healthcare applications of the Grid:
– eDiaMoND: mammography database
– Dynamic atlas of images
– Distributed signal processing
 Networked computers
• Why connect computers together?
– Fail-safe computing (during the cold war)
– Dedicated “compute” engines (eg US Weather)
– Client-server model
– email
• Local area networks – Ethernet
– Standard based on 7 layers: transport, …, application
– Ethernet server Î card Î internal to a laptop
• Wide area networks – Internet
– a network of networks
– Explosive growth in ownership of personal computers and cheap
communications (in the USA) encouraged people to connect
their PC to the Internet
 application
presentation
Ethernet = a standard comprising 7 layers of
session
hardware through to software transport
network
Data link
Physical

1.Physical Layer describes the physical properties of the various communications

media, electrical properties and interpretation of the exchanged signals. Ex: size of
Ethernet coaxial cable, the type of BNC connector used, and the termination method.
2.Data Link Layer describes the logical organization of data bits transmitted on a
particular medium. Ex: defines the addressing and checksumming of Ethernet packets.
3.Network Layer describes how a series of exchanges over various data links can
deliver data between any two nodes in a network. Ex: defines the addressing and
routing structure of the Internet.
4.Transport Layer describes the quality and nature of the data delivery. Ex: this layer
defines if and how retransmissions will be used to ensure data delivery.
5.Session Layer describes the organization of data sequences larger than the packets
handled by lower layers. Ex: this layer describes how request and reply packets are
paired in a remote procedure call.
6.Presentation Layer describes the syntax of data being transferred. Ex: this layer
describes how floating point numbers can be exchanged between hosts
7.Application Layer describes how real work actually gets done. Ex: this layer would
implement file system operations.
 Internet : the “Web”
• 3 standards
– html : hypertext markup language
– http: hypertext transfer protocol
– tcp/ip: transmission control protocol & internet
protocol
• www is a network application that uses
tcp/ip
• http enables resources to be
communicated over the Web
 http
A client web browser sends a request for a resource to a web server
and this sends back a response.
The http response carries the sought resource back to the web
browser
http://www.covenanthealth.com/PatientPortal/portals/pat/pat_contact_us.html
req
ues
t

http server

response

http is stateless: each interaction is independent of any other, so the request

header includes: security information, type of pages user can browse, limits, …
 What information is provided?
• Patient
– disease, how imaging works, what to expect,
where to learn more, …
• Physician
– Reimbursement, clinical studies, up-to-the-
minute news, tricky cases, …
• Provider
– Ordering doses, scheduling visits, reminders,
gathering statistics, …
 Internet’s explosive growth
• Currently 750 Million devices connected to the Internet
– Expected to reach 1 Bn by 2005, 1.5Bn by 2007
– Number is split equally between Europe, Asia, and North
America
• Images, digital cameras, and family snaps
• Google …
– 20,000 PCs in 6 centres plus load balancing software
• Business use of the Internet
– Products, services, and corporate propaganda
– Ticketless airlines, theatres, … disintermediation
– Downloads
– Service centres
– recruitment
 “information” from the web
• There are no constraints on who can post
information on the web
• Few constraints on what can be posted
• Some constraints on what can be
downloaded (eg from sites catering to
paedophiles)
• There is limited security especially on
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer
• Very little “information” is authoritative
 What are Grids?
• Dynamically assembled resources
– For storage, or for computation
– 50,000 PCs* beats any supercomputer**
– We need this power for integrated systems biology
* 1Bn computers connected to
• Standards Internet by end 2005
**Google uses 20,000 in 6
– Secure transmission centres plus load balancing

– WebServices
• Federation
– Databases & local curation
– Users in Virtual Organisations

Developing example in Neuroscience is USA Biomedical Informatics Research

Network http://nbirn.net organised as functional + morphological + mouse
 The technology of Grids
• Large-scale distributed computing
– Initially, hooking up powerful processors
– Increasingly, automatically “out-sourcing” provision of
storage, cycles to geographically remote, a priori
unknown, machines capable of providing the needed
service
– Optical Wide-area interconnect now faster than
internal buses on a computer
• Grid(s) as providers of services
– Rapidly emerging standards
• Virtual organisations connected by Grids
 Virtual Organisation
• Group of individuals, institutes, companies, …
who are geographically distributed but who
appear to function as one single unified
organisation
• Common focus enshrined in a set of services
– End users in a VO can use the shared services
according to the rules of the VO and resource
providers
– VOs can be dynamic: set of users, services, and
resources may change
• One typical service is security
 Core service areas
• Systems management & automation
• Workload/performance management
• Security
• Availability/service management
• Logical resource management
• Clustering services
• Connectivity management
• Physical resource management
 Open Service Architecture

Service provision view of

distributed data management
and processing
Service
provider bind
publish

Service Service
broker requester
find
 Web service standards
• UDDI: universal description, discovery &
integration
– Similar to yellow/white pages – publish services
– A service requestor makes requests to the registry
• SOAP: simple object access protocol
– Envelope that encapsulates XML data for transfer
through Web infrastructure (over http)
– Provides for remote procedure call
• WSDL: web service description language
– Describes a service in XML
 Connecting the Web services together
Current web service
standards are: http, XML,
UDDI (universal description,
discovery & integration) ,
WSDL (web service descn
language), SOAP (simple
object access protocol)
 Layered architecture of the
Community Grid Model
Grid applications Common
policies
New devices
User-focussed grid middleware,
tools and services
Grid
Sensors
economy
Common infrastructure layer
Wireless Open Grid Services Architecture
Global area
Global resources networking

The layered architecture builds on that developed over the past 20

years for local area networking and WAP phones