Sharon Gaheen and Janusz Wnek from SAIC-F Discuss Building a Collaboration Enivronment

Synopsis:

The development of evidence-based clinical guidelines is a rigorous process involving collaborative screening, identification, and systematic review of relevant literature, and the synthesis of evidence in support of guideline recommendations.  In cooperation with NHLBI, SAIC-Frederick has developed an infrastructure that combines Web 2.0 collaboration technologies with advanced knowledge mining facilities to standardize the workflow of several clinical guidelines development efforts in support of cardiovascular risk reduction.  This presentation will provide an overview of the application of collaboration and knowledge-mining technologies in clinical guidelines development enabling the translation of evidence-based research supporting cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention, detection, and treatment into clinical practice, as well as to provide foundation for the future integrated approach to CVD guidelines.

Bios:

Janusz Wnek, Ph.D. has more than 20 years of experience in developing and applying machine learning methods to document processing, data mining, and information retrieval and classification. He has developed and patented several methods and systems for automating enterprise search and knowledge management and has expertise in machine vision, machine translation, bioinformatics, and scientific programming. Dr. Wnek led the implementation of state-of-the art solutions supporting evidence-based guideline development at NHLBI, including the development and execution of literature search strategies. His leadership resulted in the deployment of the guideline infrastructure, including a Web 2.0 collaborative workspace that emulates the guideline development workflow; a central repository of annotated medical literature; a multimodal, sophisticated literature search and data mining engine; and several custom mod­ules for conducting systematic reviews, evidence aggrega­tion, and analysis.  Dr. Wnek has a Ph.D. in Information Technology and Engineering from George Mason University, an M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland.

Sharon Gaheen, an SAIC-Frederick Technical Program Manager, provided management support for the NHLBI clinical guidelines effort. Ms. Gaheen has provided management support on a variety of health informatics projects supporting nanotechnology, translational research, genomics/proteomics, biomedical imaging, clinical protocol analysis, and clinical guidelines development. She has an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).