Course description

Course Contents

Medically orientated scientific research can be broadly divided into two main areas, i) gaining understanding of (molecular) processes related to initiation and progression of disease in man and ii) development and evaluation of diagnostic methods and (curative) therapeutic approaches for human disease.

 

Course lay-out

Research line: Public Health and Epidemiology

Title of the project: I-Catcher

Brief work plan of the student: The objective of this internship is to learn how research was and is conducted in the project I-Catcher and how to report on it. The internship will focus on the temporal knowledge extraction part of the project. In particular the candidate will get insight in and describe: the objective of the project, the motivation behind it, the sponsor, the research questions, the teams, the ideas, and the output (publications, demo etc). Two contributions of this internship are 1. to contrast the original research proposal with the actual research activities and results, and 2. to investigate how new research questions arose from this research.

 

Educational goals

During the short internships the master student will gain insight in different aspects of the research process. He/she will be guided along four different phases of the sicentific research process, i) creating a valid scientific hypothesis, ii) writing a research proposal, iii) performing experiments and gaining results, iv) writing a paper.

 

Since the master student is confronted with a relatively new subject (s)he will also gain experience in interviewing other professionals about their research and in obtaining knowledge about the subject by a survey of relevant documents. The mastery of these activities is very important for medical informatics professionals.

 

Internship I: Gain knowledge of and describe the organisation of (information) processes involved in a specific patient related scientific research project. Evaluate methods of remaining up to date with the (international) developments in the frontlines of the current field of research.

 

Involved departments

• Clinical Informatics
• Public Health and Epidemiology

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

I was interested in doing research in the area of public health and epidemiology. The focus of my research was on the temporal knowledge extraction part of the project. It was very interesting to see how I-Catcher came of the ground and how research was and is conducted. I learned a lot about the research process and I improved my writing skills; I also liked the possibility to speak with professionals in the field and question them about their experiences, two other experiences which I improved was interviewing and planning. It is necessary to thoroughly plan every action you take. The internship had a duration of one month, so you had to plan some things in advance in order to avoid any time related problems. Furthermore planning is required because of the fact that professionals do not always have the time for you, you have to plan the appointments and otherwise you will have to think about alternatives. One suggestion I would like to do is that the two internships are merged into one internship; you could do a lot more in two months than in one month for each internship, the goals of the two internships are sufficient.