Large-Scale Development and Validation of Clinical Prediction Models using Electronic Health Records

by Prof. Peter Rijnbeek

Dr. Rijnbeek is Associate Professor Health Data Science and is the lead of the Health Data Science group (HDS, www.healthdatascience.nl) at the Department of Medical Informatics of the Erasmus MC, The Netherlands. He obtained his MSc (1996) in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University Delft. His PhD thesis, received from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, was on the development of a computer program to automatically interpret pediatric electrocardiograms.   The HDS team has a leading role in the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI, www.ohdsi.org) initiative that is enabling the generation of reliable evidence from observational data at an unprecedented scale. He is the coordinator of the European Health Data and Evidence Network (EHDEN, www.ehden.eu) IMI project that builds a federated network of health data bases across Europe. Once stored in the CDM, the data can be used to build and validate predictive models, perform large-scale characterisation, and population-level effect estimation studies. The HDS Group is performing methods research in all these domains and is applying these approaches in large global network studies.


On the use of deep learning techniques to cancer multi-resolution histological images: challenges and opportunities

by Prof. Elisa Ficarra

Elisa Ficarra got a PhD in Computer and  Systems Engineering at the Dept. of Control and Computer Engineering – Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in June 2006. She worked from 2015 to 2021 as Associate Professor in the same department. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at the Dept. of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari” in the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, where she joined the AImageLab, a research unit of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Prof. Ficarra was visiting scientist at the Integrated System Laboratory of EPFL (Lausanne, CH) from 2005 to 2006, working on bioimage features and genomic data integration for functional genomics. Professor Ficarra acted as scientific coordinator for Politecnico di Torino, and currently for the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, of various European funded projects in bioinformatics and bioimage processing in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases studies. She is a scientific consultant for bioinformatics and bioimage informatics in a Wellcome Trust funded project on monoclonal antibodies therapy design. Her research activities focus on fluorescent, histological and medical image informatics, sequencing data analysis, multi-omics data integration, exploiting machine learning/deep learning techniques and bioinformatics.  She has been Associate Editor in IEEE and BMC journals, and she is a member of TPCs of several IEEE/ACM conferences..