HI 6302 Knowledge Modeling and Engineering in Health Informatics

(2 hours lecture/3 hours laboratory)
3 semester credit hours/meets part of advanced informatics competencies
Prerequisite: consent of instructor

This course covers in-depth the methods and techniques for knowledge modeling and engineering in health care. This includes an introduction on how to conduct a task analysis and how to collect and analyze domain knowledge gathered from reference sources or expert behavior. The course also covers how these methods and techniques are used to construct health informatics systems that are more robust, more helpful and easier to use than systems engineered without these techniques. Also covered are various techniques for evaluating the accuracy and effectiveness of the constructed systems from experimental data. The students also have an opportunity to engineer knowledge models using connectionist representations. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on how knowledge engineering is used to design decision support tools, tutoring systems and educational improvements for health informatics. In the second part of the course, students are given a knowledge engineering task in a health care area for which they must develop a knowledge model and then construct and evaluate a knowledge-based system.