About us

Medical Informatics - University of West Bohemia (CZE)
Web: https://mi.kiv.zcu.cz

The Medical Informatics at the NTIS Research Centre & the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia was officialy established in 2015 by the merge of several small, more or less independent research teams and researchers that performed their research in biomedicine and the related fields at the Department of Computer Science, particularly: Neuroinformatics Research Group, Medical Information Systems Research Group, Biomedical Data Processing and Visualization team of the Centre of Computer Graphics and Visualization, and Biomedical Data Processing team of the Computer Vision Group, and a few individuals.

The group focuses on the development of in-silico models, methods, and information technology with the purpose of increasing the speed, efficiency and reliability of bioengineering efforts in medicine. Its research includes analysis of input biomedical data and corresponding metadata, their semantic description and its standardization, as well as persistent storage of such data, its sharing and efficient searching on the semantic level, the development of in-silico simulation models, and visual representation of data, metadata and simulation results for the professionals and the general public. The group has been involved with various national projects (e.g., MZ IGA – NT 13326, GAČR 407/12/1525, GAČR 406/09/0150, CZ.1.05/3.1.00/14.0298), and European projects (e.g., VPHOP – FP7-ICT-223865) to support its research activities.

The laboratory of the group is equipped with professional scanning equipment for EEG/ERP, ECG, EMG and other bio signals, including recording and analysis software and a driving simulator. It has also an acoustic and electrically shielded chamber. NTIS Research Centre provides to the group high quality computing and data storage facilities for performing in-silico simulations, specifically, data storage disks in RAID mode with backup and with a capacity of 10 TB and 16 TB expandable up to 96 TB (will be extended), two GPU computing nodes equipped with 8 PC cards Nvidia Tesla K20,  two Xeon E5 CPU with 256 GB RAM and also a symmetric multiprocessing of 256 CPU cores with 4 TB RAM.

Particularly, the group has vast experience in:

• acquisition of EEG/ERP signal data both in laboratory and real-life conditions

• filtering and analysis of 1D signal data (especially, EEG/ERP, voice, and glucose levels time series measured in various body compartments)

• filtering and segmentation of medical images

• medical data annotation using both already existing standard or newly proposed ontologies

• storing the acquired data together with the associated metadata (e.g., medical records and annotations) into a population database (currently, about 700 patients)

• extraction of geometrical information (e.g., shape) of objects (e.g., organs) from the medical images and their 3D modelling

• 3D visualization of medical data sets and models

• patient-specific musculoskeletal modelling