The National Institutes of Health, under the National Library of Medicine’s program on data science research, has awarded a $1.55 million to an interdisciplinary team lead by Luis Rocha, a professor of informatics and the director of the NSF-NRT complex networks and systems program at the IU School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering.
The four-year project, a collaboration between SICE and the Indiana University School of Nursing, will employ innovative data- and network-science methods to produce myAURA, an easy-to-use web service for epilepsy patients.
This service will integrate practical, location- and patient-specific healthcare information with electronic health records, targeted scientific literature, biomedical databases, social media, and epilepsy-related websites with information about specialists, clinical trials, drugs, community resources, and more. The project builds on previous research conducted by Rocha’s team and funded by Persistent Systems, which extracted big data about chronic conditions and drug interactions from Twitter and Instagram.
myAURA will be based on a large-scale epilepsy knowledge graph built by integrating data from social media, electronic health records, patient discussion boards, scientific literature databases, advocacy websites, and mobile app data. The knowledge graph will, in turn, be used to fuel recommendation and visualization algorithms based on the automatic inference of relevant associations.
The inference will follow algorithms developed by Rocha’s team to remove redundancy and extract factual information from large knowledge graphs as well as parsimonious network visualizations developed by Katy Börner, an IU Distinguished Professor in the IU School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering.
The project will also focus on user-centered development and pilot testing of myAURA to validate if and how it improves patient activation through a series of studies lead by Wendy Miller, an assistant professor at the IU School of Nursing.
Updated information on epilepsy treatment can be difficult for patients to obtain, and the team hopes to create a novel resource for patients.
