Class Projects: Ideas, Data and Technology
Students are required to do a class project. Groups may work together
if a project is of sufficient scope to challenge several people, but in
joint work each participant should have an interesting portion for which
he or she is responsible. Some project ideas of possible interest:
( See also use of chest
pain data)
- Noticing the data that are actually present in the Children's database,
design a database structure that is normalized (irredundant) and appears
to reflect the operations of Children's.
- Design (and, possibly implement) a scheme for "scrubbing"
the Children's database. This process is supposed to retain all the logical
connectivity of the actual database (i.e., one-to-one correspondence with
it), but hide as much identifying information about individuals as possible.
We currently have a fairly simplistic approach to this issue.
- Read the "free text" in docs and find (with some degree of
reliability) the list of problems attributed to the patient. (The problem
list is also available in the database, and that can be used to check your
results; the emphasis here is to be on extraction of information from the
text.)
- In the spirit of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record, design and (maybe)
implement an interesting visual display of the most important information
in the record.
- Develop a simple (if possible) mechanism that represents protocol-based
care for some common condition(s), and design a way to recognize how data
being accumulated in the database correspond to steps or events in the
protocol.
- Figure out how to provide some form of automated diagnostic assistance
by using data from the database along with some models of disease (such
as ones we have considered in class) to identify possible diagnoses. Try
to implement a diagnostic program that recognizes some diseases in the
database.
- Use the case data available to you to determine parameters (and maybe
structure) for a statistical model of diagnosis.
We have licenses for various pieces of technology that can be used to
perform these projects. Instructions for how to install and configure access
to the data from PC's are available here.
Other possibilities also exist, but you will need to work with the instructor
to work out details.
I have also pressed a CD-ROM that contains both the hospital and
chest pain databases, in the form of Microsoft Access files. These
can be borrowed and loaded onto your own machine.