Dr. Stephane Meystre has been awarded a contract by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to provide VHA clinical research with methods and instruments for syndrome surveillance, improve detection and mitigation of health problems in deployed veterans, and more specifically detect medically unexplained syndromes (MUS) and emergent infectious diseases. This contract, in the amount of $1,543,680, runs from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012.
Developing tools to effectively use information extracted from VHA clinical documents depends on expertise in information extraction, ontology development, symptom identification, predictive modeling, and interactive information visualization. This work will therefore be realized by a scientific team that brings together experts from a variety of disciplines including epidemiology, infectious disease, mental health, computer science, biomedical informatics, and statistics. Dr. Meystre works in collaboration with Drs. Mollie Cummins, Jennifer Garvin, and Scott DuVall in the biomedical informatics department, as well as with Mr. Guy Divita in internal medicine, and Dr. Yarden Livnat from the SCI (Scientific Computing and Imaging) Institute.