REU Site: MedIX: Medical Informatics Experiences in Undergraduate Research

The main objectives of the Medical Informatics (MedIX) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site program are to engage undergraduate students in challenging research projects, encourage them to pursue graduate education, and expose students to interdisciplinary research, especially at the border of information technology and medicine. The MedIX REU Site runs for three summers, with ten student participants doing research ten weeks each summer under the supervision of five mentors dedicated to undergraduate research. The REU Site is hosted by two interdisciplinary laboratories: the Medical Informatics Laboratory at DePaul University and the Imaging Research Institute at the University of Chicago. The research environment offers the students the opportunity to interact with computer scientists, medical physicists, and medical doctors. All of the projects are inspired by state-of-the-art research questions in medical informatics and will address issues related to the coordinated, workflow-driven acquisition of image data in an electronic medical record environment and the subsequent processing of the image and clinical report text information. Students work as part of faculty-undergraduate teams on new problems ranging from traditional image processing (e.g., computer-aided diagnosis for lung cancer, breast density assessment, age-related macular degeneration prognosis) to structured reporting and natural language processing of radiology reports to visualization and annotation of images from multiple imaging modalities using novel computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science algorithms. Ultimately, this REU site will help support students interested in medical informatics and broaden participation in computer science. In addition, each project has the long-term potential to improve the accuracy, reliability and efficiency of the consumers of this information, notably radiologists. More information on the program can be found at the MedIX REU Site web site (http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/research/vc/medix). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.