Tutorials

Sunday, March 15
8:30 am - 12:00 pm

Half-day tutorials are offered to provide in-depth treatment on special topics in translational bioinformatics.  The faculty of AMIA tutorials are widely recognized subject matter experts and thought leaders in their area(s) of research.  Tutorials provide an opportunity for instruction focused on core theory and principles, practical applications, current issues, and emerging trends and developments in the field.  Tutorial content ranges from introductory to intermediate to advanced subjects.

Registration for tutorials is additional to the general symposium registration. Please note many tutorials are being held at the same time, so make sure to watch the times on the tutorials you choose to attend.

Tutorial Program Overview (click on tutorial titles for additional information)

T01: Introduction to Translational Bioinformatics, Atul Butte, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

In 2005, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wrote "It is the responsibility of those of us involved in today's biomedical research enterprise to translate the remarkable scientific innovations we are witnessing into health gains for the nation... At no other time has the need for a robust, bidirectional information flow between basic and translational scientists been so necessary." Clearly evident in Dr. Zerhouni's quote is the role biomedical informatics needs to play in facilitating translational medicine. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) recently added Translational Bioinformatics as one of its three major domains of informatics. This tutorial is designed around the successful curriculum used in Stanford's 2007 Translational Bioinformatics, one of the first courses to be offered in this field. This tutorial is designed to teach the basics of the various types of molecular data and methodologies currently used in bioinformatics and genomics research, and how these can interface with clinical data. This tutorial will address the hypotheses one can start with by integrating molecular biological data with clinical data, and will show how to implement systems to address these hypotheses. The tutorial will cover real-world case-studies of how genetic, genomics, and proteomic data has been integrated with clinical data.

T02: Design & Conduct of Evaluation Studies in Translational Bioinformatics, Charles P. Friedman, Office of the National Coordinator, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD

It is now generally accepted that evaluation of information resources is one of the fundamental activities of biomedical and health informatics. Evaluation studies can address a wide range of questions using a wide range of methods. Studies are carried out before, during, and following the deployment of information resources. This tutorial is designed to support anyone designing, carrying out, or critically appraising an evaluative study of a biomedical information resource. The tutorial will offer an introduction to the rigorous scientific methods underlying evaluation, in such a manner that they are understandable and practical to apply. The tutorial starts by defining evaluation and describing why we do it, then discusses alternative approaches and how to select between them. A case study focused on translational bioinformatics is used to introduce evaluation techniques and examine their strengths and weaknesses. The tutorial will also address how to formulate and include appropriate levels of evaluation in the context of projects whose primary focus is development of a new information resource.

T03: geWorkbench: An Open-Source Platform for Integrated Genomics, Aris Floratos, Columbia University, New York, NY