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 Room
No.
23 |
972-8-646-1380(W) |
 Email:
yshahar@bgumail.bgu.ac.il |
 +972-8-647-7527 |
| Positions | Research/Professional Interests | Personal Research Statement | Education/Other Relevant Experience |
| Personal Interests | Publications at Stanford | Projects | Courses |
Full Professor
Head of the Medical
Informatics Research Center
Department of Information Systems Engineering
Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel 84105
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Personal Research Statement:
A task common to many application domains is the analysis of data accumulated
over time, leading to identification of past and present trends and to episodic
decisions made on the basis of the previous and the current state of the world.
An example of such a task in the medical domain is managing patients who are
being treated with clinical guidelines. An inherent requirement of such tasks
is to accumulate and to analyze patient data over time and constantly to revise
an assessment of the patient's state by abstracting higher-level,
context-sensitive concepts from the raw input data. These higher-level concepts
can be used for summarizing large medical databases, for monitoring, for
replanning therapy, for providing explanations to a user of a decision-support
system, for (temporal) data mining and knowledge discovery, and as a basis for a more intelligent dialog between an automated
decision-support system and a human health-care provider.
My work focuses on defining basic knowledge-based, domain-independent temporal-abstraction mechanisms and the formal knowledge needed to instantiate them in any particular medical domain. Formalization of temporal-abstraction knowledge supports the acquisition, representation, maintenance, reuse, and sharing of that knowledge. I have therefore defined a knowlede-based temporal-abstraction framework, implemented it as the RÉSUMÉ system, and tested it in several clinical domains. The framework has been expanded and embedded in a larger architecture, Tzolkin, which combines temporal-reasoning and temporal-maintenance services. Tzolkin had been used within the EON component-based architecure for guideline-based care. An extension of Tzolkin is the IDAN temporal mediator at Ben Gurion University's Medical Informatics Research Center .
I am also leading the KNAVE (knowledge-based Navigation of Abstractions for Visualization and Explanation) project, which focuses on an interactive framework for visualization and exploration of time-oriented data (e.g., patient clinical data) and their multiple-levels of abstractions. the KNAVE project has been extended into the KNAVE-II project at Ben Gurion University's Medical Informatics Research Center, evaluated by Martins et al. (2008) at the Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care Center, and later extended into the VISITORS project for query, interactive visual exploration, and exploration of the temporal associations of the time-oriented data of multiple patients.
I also am interested in (therapy) plan generation, revision, recognition and critiquing in clinical domains; I have previously set up the Asgaard project, ongoing in several countries, which investigates these tasks. I am also leading the Digital Electronic Guideline Library (DeGeL) project, which creates a distributed framework for specification, retrieval, and use of clinical guidelines.
The DeGeL, IDAN, KNAVE-II, VISITORS, and other related projects are part of my Medical Informatics Research Center, a faculty-wide research center whose main laboratory is at the Department of Information Systems Engineering of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel.
Finally, I am interested in decision-theoretical aspects of clinical decision
making. I have previously led the PANDA
project at Stanford University, which applied decision analytic methodologies to the domain of genetic
consultation, taking into account the patient's characteristics and personal
preferences, and the
PANDEX
project at BGU, which has implemented these methodologies on the WEB and
investigated seevral methods for sensitivity analysis of the recommended optimal
decision.
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Education/Other Relevant Experience
School, Location Major Subject, Degree, and Date
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, Natural Sciences, B.Sc., 1978
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, Medicine, M.D., 1981
IDF Computer Academy, Ramat Gan, Israel, System Analysis & Design,
System Analyst, 1985
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel , Mathematics & Computer Science,
M.Sc. studies, 1985-1988
Yale University, New Haven, CT, Computer Science (A.I.), M.S., 1990
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Medical Information Sciences, Ph.D., 1994
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Personal Interests:
Bridge (Silver Grand Master, Israel; Life Master, USA; Best Play Award, 1982 European
Junior Bridge Championship)
Magic (Honorary Member for professional contributions, Israeli Magicians
Association)
Science Fiction
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Decision Support Systems in Medicine
Temporal Reasoning and Planning in
Medical Information Systems
Judgement and Decision Making in
Information Systems
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