Overview

The effective, but safe use of medical “big data” has become an extremely important issue in medicine and medical care. Electronic medical information accumulated nationwide in Japan is a valuable public asset and knowledge resource. It has therefore become a priority for the overall medical community to enable this medical data and make it available in a safe and secure way for research and analysis, and to ultimately return the benefits and value the data contains for bennefit and use of the entire nation.

Within the Medical Dx Platform Development Division, we are engaged in research and development that can enable safe, private, effective and productive utilizion of medical data from the viewpoint of mathematical informatics.

Research Keywords

Information Infrastructure, Data Science, Data Mining, Medical Big Data, Privacy Protection, Network Security

Research Topics

(1) Medical data mining and medical AI

Medical Big Data has tremendous potential for application and development for the health and welbeing of society. Already, Artificial Intelligence (AI) using deep learning has been applied to societal data in recent years resulting in major benefits and positive outcomes and the inclusion of medical big data is indispensable for the further development of medical AI and discovery.

In addition to development of cutting-edge research in medical AI, medical big data is also extremely effective in the development of potential new drugs and the evaluation of existing treatments. It is also expected to greatly facilitate innovation in areas such as precision medicine, which has great potential to provide personalized medical care and development of disease control methods for prevention and prediction of illness before it is prevalent.

In order to extract new knowledge from medical big data so it can contribute to quality improvements in medical care and basic research, we are working on integrated analysis combining advanced knowledge in the fields of mathematics and informatics.

2) Utilization of University Medical Data

The University of Tsukuba Hospital is a respected medical institution in Japan which also performs an important research function where valuable data can be obtained and accummulated through medical treatment on a daily basis.

However, it is difficult to collect and use medical data for statistical analysis or AI training in it’s raw form and it is necessary to pre-process the data formatting so it is suitable for analysis. However, in this process, there are many situations where the specific meaning of data cannot be effectively interpreted or isolated without input from specialized medical knowledge unique to actual clinical settings. We therefore combine and utilize the strengths of university-affiliated hospitals to examine and preprocess data in direct collaboration with the specialists in the clinical settings where data is generated.

(3) Privacy Protection

Medical data contains enormous amounts of highly sensitive information, including patient medical histories, etc, which must be protected, kept private and remain digitally secure.

It is essential to comply with privacy laws, regulations and research ethics. With this in mind, we are enabling an environment for processing medical information so valuable data for effective research and development can still be retained and made usable for analysis.

We are developing a suitable ecosystem for processing of large-scale data that meets security requirements and stipulations. We are ensuring desired use of data complies with required laws and regulations, but also making medical data available for use and benefit of medical research, clinical development, and society as a whole.

Overall Digital Medicine Strategy Division led by:

Professor Hiroyuki Nishiyama

MedDx Platform Development Laboratory

Headed by Assistant Professor Masaru Sanuki

---

　　

Research Division Leader