Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering

Description:
Biomedical engineering applies engineering principles to the medical and biological sciences. It comprises several fields of research, including bioinformatics, medical imaging, physiological signal processing, as well as medical informatics. Bioinformatics is a relatively new field of research that applies mathematical and computer science theories to organize, model and help understand fundamental biological and biomedical problems.

Applications:
Biomedical engineering and bioinformatics create new knowledge from molecular to systems level. Biomedical engineering focuses on developing approaches for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. Major research efforts in bioinformatics include alignment of molecular sequences, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure prediction, protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution.

PROFESSORS

• Anis, Hanan
  Biophotonics
• Bouchard, Martin
  signal processing for biomedical applications
• Boukerche (group)
  bioinformatics, computational molecular biology, distributed algorithms design, high performance and bio-inspired techniques
• Dajani, Hilmi R.
  auditory signal processing
• El Saddik, Abdulmotaleb
  haptics-audio-visual environments, DNA visualization
• Frize(group)
  infrared thermography applications in medicine; clinical decision support systems,  analysis, diagnostics; medical equipment management, infra-red medical imaging processing and analysis
• Giguère
  signal processing and hearing aids, auditory modeling and psychoacoustics, speech production and perception in noise
• Groza, Voicu
  embedded systems for healthcare monitoring, reconfigurable computing
• Mao (group)
  graphical models and statistical inference
• Matwin, Stan
  data mining, machine learning, and text classification, and their application to bioinformatics and biomedical engineering
• Mussivand
  medical devices, artificial hearts, devices for heart failure, clinical engineering, virtual patient simulation, biofluid dynamics, energy transfer, DNA extraction and identification
• Peyton, Liam
  medical informatics, business process management, decision support, data warehousing, and privacy
• Rolland-Lagan
  developmental biology, pattern formation, image and volume data analysis, simulation modeling, computational morphodynamics
• Sankoff (group)
  mathematical genomics
• Turcotte (group)    
  bioinformatics, algorithms design, and machine learning

Research groups involving several professors:

• Medical Devices Center (MDC) at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute

Some recent projects:

• Design of Parallel strategies for the local biological and DNA sequence alignment in a grid environment [Boukerche]
• PackageBLAST: an adaptive multi-policy grid service for biological sequence comparison [Boukerche]
• Inference and matching of RNA secondary structure motifs using suffix arrays [Boukerche] (see Seed)
• Simultaneous alignment and secondary structure prediction of RNA profiles [Turcotte; NSERC and CFI] (see Profile-Dynalign)
• Evolving E-Health Business Processes Around Accessible Data Warehouses [Amyot/Peyton; ORNEC project - Partners: Cognos, Telelogic, Sybase, The Ottawa Hospital] show details
• Intelligent Signal Processing for Environment-Sensitive Hearing Aid Devices - Smart hearing aid, technology helping people [Tyseer Aboulnasr, NSERC-CRD project, partner: Siemens/Germany ] show details
• "Robust Blood Pressure Monitoring System": There is a pressing need for a reliable method for extracting clinically relevant information from arterial pulse features such as rate,pressure, rhythm and waveform [Groza; funded partially by OCE, partner: Biosign Inc.]
• Haptics-based modeling of DNA structure: We are working towards developing a haptically enabled model for the structure of DNA. The developed model can serve as a good instructional aid for helping users to understand the molecular structure of DNA through effective visual representation and interactive manipulation. In incorporating more physical details, it may also have a future use in simulating protein and enzyme interactions with DNA [El Saddik].
• Quantitative analysis of morphogenesis: Development of tools to quantify and simulate branching and network pattern formation in two and three dimensions [Rolland-Lagan].