AEHRC: 19/20 Annual Report - COVID, Artificial Intelligence and more

by Denis Bauer

The Australian E-Health Research Center (AEHRC), which the Transformational Bioinformatics Group is part of, just published its annual report for 2019-20. It provides an overview of the great work that our scientists, engineers and students have undertaken with our partners over the past 12 months.

Other than contributing to Australia's COVID response, the 100+ scientists and engineers of the program have contributed to industrial research, medical applications, and academic research through out involvement in 20 NHMRC and MRFF projects.

Read the full report AEHRC 19/20 Annual Report (PDF) for details.

AEHRC has contributed to Australia’s response. This included genomics to support the vaccine testing, data analytics to build data models with health agencies and a COVID-19 dashboard that is still being used around Australia.

We also released our Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) across our projects and technologies. The AI and ML in Healthcare report provides 34 case studies demonstrating the wide range of AI technologies we use, as well as providing a useful primer on AI and ML.

Our annual report highlights the platform technologies being developed by the program's five research groups along with the projects they are undertaking with partners and collaborators. Some of the highlights include:

  • The AEHRC Health Services group worked with Queensland Hospitals on a mobile phone-delivered service for women with gestational diabetes, and with Western Australian Hospitals on a mobile phone approach to monitoring burns and wounds.
  • The AEHRC Health System Analytics group has worked with hospitals in Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria on data analytics projects to improve hospital service efficiencies – and with GP services around Australia to support the Commonwealth Healthcare Home Project.
  • The AEHRC Health Informatics group continues to work with the Australian Digital Health Agency on the National Clinical Terminology Service, and has been working with health systems in UK and elsewhere on similar services. AEHRC Health Informatics continues to work with Queensland Health on data analytics for cancer and antimicrobial resistance projects.
  • The AEHRC Biomedical Informatics group continues to partner in large national trials for diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Cerebral Palsy to provide image analytics and biostatical analysis, to find new ways of diagnosing and monitoring these diseases.
  • The AEHRC Transformational Bioinformatics group continues to push the boundaries of cloud computing for data analytics on large collections of whole genome sequencing for diseases such as Motor Neuron Disease.