Faculty of Computer Science
6050 University Avenue
Dalhousie University
Halifax, NS
COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR
Speakers: Drs. Yaacov Yesha and Yelena Yesha
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Title: Personalized Medicine
Date: Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Time: 11:30 a.m.
Location: Jacob Slonim Conference Room (430), Computer Science
Dalhousie University
6050 University Avenue, Halifax]
Note: Coffee and cookies will be provided, courtesy of Faculty of
Computer Science.
Abstract:
Personalized Medicine is the systematic use of individual patient’s information to optimize patient’s therapeutic care and diagnosis process. Information about patient’s clinical, genomic and metabolic characteristics can be used to tailor medical care that meets individual’s needs. Preventive or therapeutic interventions can then be focused on those who will benefit, sparing expense and side effects for those who will not. It also classifies individuals into subpopulations that differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease or their response to a specific treatment. TheHuman Genome Project completed in 2003, a 13-year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health have laid the groundwork for the understanding of the roles of genes in normal human development. Personalized medicine with evidence-based approach offers solutions to the treatment of complex chronic diseases like Diabetes in which wide array of factors influence the dynamics of the disease. Pharmacogenomics is an emerging field of personalized medicine that examines the impact of genetic variation on the response to medications. This approach is aimed at tailoring drug therapy at a dosage that is most appropriate for an individual patient, with the potential benefits of increasing the efficacy and safety of medications. However, an ever-growing gap exists between accumulating knowledge derived from basic scientific and clinical research, new molecular mechanisms, genomic details, recent medical and therapeutic guidelines and its use at the bed-side by the practitioner. The data being heterogeneous, integration all the information present in various databases is a challenging task. To add to the efforts of resolving this issue, we propose to develop a Web-based clinical decision support system that will enable the physician to personalize in real time, at the point of care, for the specific patient. The patient will also have a timely access to the relevant knowledge. This system will allow prediction of a high risk patient requiring immediate attention with an optimal drug therapy using evidence based knowledge. Thus maximizing over all quality of assistance provided to the patient.
Speaker Bios:
Yaacov Yesha is a tenured Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Prior to joining the University of Maryland Baltimore County he was a tenured Associate Professor at the Ohio State University. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1979 from the Weizmann Institute of Science. His interests include SSME (service science, management and engineering), Web services, personalized medicine, mobile computing, wireless networks, and software testing. He has many publications in refereed journals and proceedings, and has received substantial external research funding from NSF, NSA, NIST, SAP, IBM, and Aether Systems Inc. He was a program committee member of several conferences.
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/person/html/Yaacov/Yesha/
Yelena Yesha is a tenured Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She received her B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and in Applied Mathematics from York University, Toronto, Canada, in 1984, and her M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University in 1986 and 1989, respectively. She joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County as an Assistant Professor in 1989. In 1994 she was promoted to the rank of tenured Associate Professor, and in 1995 she was promoted to the rank of tenured Professor. In 1994-1995 she was the Director of the Center for Applied Information Technology (CAIT) at the National Institute of Standards and Technolog. In 1995 she became the Director of the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. From 2009 through the present she is the Director of the UMBC site of the National Science Foundation Industry-University Collaborative Research Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research. She has published 10 books as author or editor, and more than 120 papers in prestigious refereed journals and refereed conference proceedings, and has been awarded external funding in a total amount exceeding 21 million dollars.
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/person/html/Yelena/Yesha/
Host contact: Evangelos Milios eem@cs.dal.ca
