Professor Fred Prior Delivers Seminar on Biomedical Informatics

Prior delivers his lecture to students and faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Photo by Elizabeth DeMeo

Prior delivers his lecture to students and faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

On Friday, Sept. 23, Fred Prior delivered a seminar titled, "Biomedical Informatics: Analytics for Precision Medicine." Prior is a professor and inaugural chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences with over 30 years of R&D experience in industry and academia. In particular, his work focuses on the design of advanced medical information management and imaging technologies, and his research interests include cancer informatics, radiomics, advanced imaging technologies, and big data analytics.

During his talk, Prior highlighted the goals of biomedical informatics, noting that for professors, the aim is "to train students to be multilingual." In translating data into actionable knowledge, he explained, students of biomedical informatics must be comfortable conversing in the fields of mathematics, computer science, and more, and then translating what they've learned into the biomedical realm.

Prior delivers his lecture to students and faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering

He also discussed the ways in which biomedical informatics took on new dimensions with the advent of big data-based biomedical research in the 21st century. He focused on precision medicine, specifically the use of quantitative image analysis, or radiomics. Over the course of his seminar, he touched on radiomic analysis, space representations of images, and the pathway to imaging phenotypes. He also explored the role of public image repositories in precision medicine, and presented examples of current projects based on NCI's Cancer Imaging Archive at UAMS.

"Dr. Prior's visit is also critical to developing broader research and training relationships between UAF and UAMS. The programs that are being developed at UAMS are expected to immensely benefit our undergraduate and graduate students and faculty, as we seek to grow our biomedical engineering research enterprise," said Rao, department head of biomedical engineering.

Prior's seminar was the second in a series offered by the Department of Biomedical Engineering on select Fridays this fall. Upcoming seminars are listed below—note that all seminars will held in KIMP 105, save for the last one on Nov. 18, which will be held in GRAD 166. All interested students and faculty are encouraged to attend:

  • Oct. 21: Lucas Timmins, University of Utah, bioengineering
  • Nov. 4: Edward Sander, University of Iowa, biomedical engineering
  • Nov. 18: Michael S. Sacks, University of Texas at Austin, biomedical engineering
Contacts

Elizabeth DeMeo, media specialist
Biomedical Engineering
479-575-4667, eademeo@uark.edu

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