Fu-Chiang (Rich) Tsui, PhD

Research Interests

Dr. Tsui’s past and current research involves the application of biosurveillance, time series analyses, machine learning, expert systems, grid computing, and artificial intelligence to biomedical informatics research problems. He has been investigating those topic areas for the past 10 years and has produced over 40 peer-reviewed publications. He is currently involved in the following research projects:

Biosurveillance (Public Health Surveillance) Grid: Dr. Tsui recently received a two-year CDC funding for building, deploying and evaluating the PA-OH Biosurveillance Grid (PA-OH BiG), which allows federated data sharing between five participating public health entities: the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Ohio Department of Health, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Allegheny County Health Department, and the University of Pittsburgh.  The goal of this project is to advance current public health practice by using an efficient secure grid network to exchange data instead of using fax or mails.

Bayesian Case Detection System: Dr. Tsui recently received a five-year CDC funding for building a Bayesian case detection system (CDS) using Bayesian networks and natural language processing tools. This project will move existing biosurveillance to the next level by notifying public health practitioners of suspected cases (e.g., suspected SARS or measles cases) before the confirmed lab reports become available, which will allow more time for public health officials to conduct an investigation and will provide more data to guide an investigation.  The long-term goal of this project is to help hospital and public health officials identify cases of importance and to develop a technical and professional relationship between public health practice to local hospitals.

MRSA Case Detection/Reporting: This project is to monitor MRSA cases and provides de-identified daily MRSA reports to public health researchers for sub-typing the notified MRSA cases.  This project provides a framework for systematically parsing culture reports, stores data into a structured database that allows researchers to query various of organisms in the future and facilitate a great resource for data mining.

Influenza-like-Illness (ILI) Counts Reporting: With the imminent threat of H1N1 swine flu, this project is to automatically detect ILI cases and fever cases by processing UPMC Emergency Department (ED) freetext reports and provides daily counts for the last 7 days to the Allegheny County Health Department. This ILI detection system serves as an automated sentinel physician reporting system overseeing several UPMC hospitals.

Biomedical Research Database: Dr. Tsui is working on building a biomedical research database based on the framework of OpenMRS, a well developed popular open source medical record database.  The initial phase is to migrate existing Clinical Event Monitor (CLEM) database to the standard OpenMRS and adopts other open source tools such as Mirth to process various hospital data feeds such as Radiology reports, dictation reports, laboratory (including culture) reports, pharmacy orders and radiology/lab orders. Such database allows researchers perform efficient data queries for conducting various research projects.  It currently serves MRSA case detection/reporting gthat Dr. Tsui recently initiated.

Algorithms for Biosurveillance: The goal is to develop spatial and temporal algorithms for the early detection of disease outbreaks from data that are commonly available electronically.  For example, RODS Laboratory currently collects admission data in real-time from emergency departments in Pennsylvania and daily over-the-counter medicine sales from the entire country.  Dr. Tsui focuses on the development of algorithms that use multiple data sets and spatial temporal information to achieve early detection of disease outbreaks.

Bayesian Aerosol Release Detector (BARD): Dr. Tsui is working with William Hogan, MD and others on the development of the Bayesian algorithm that can identify the source of aerosol release of a bio-agent (e.g., Anthrax) based on patient admission information from regional emergency departments. Dr. Tsui will employ advanced dispersion model (e.g., Second-order Closure Integrated Gaussian Puff) to further enhance the capability of BARD in outbreak simulation and detection.

Appointments and Positions

Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Intelligent Systems
Associate Director, RODS Laboratory
Biomedical Informatics Training Program Core Faculty

Current Research Projects and Collaborations

Development and Evaluation of a Biosurveillance Grid (PA-OH BiG)

Funded by the CDC, which allows five participating members—Pennsylvania Department of Health, Ohio Department of Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Allegheny County Health Department, and the University of Pittsburgh—to share data and detection algorithms.

Development of Advanced Case Detection for Multiple Diseases Using Cinical Data (freetext and coded)

Funded by the CDC, as a part of CDC Center of Excellence P01 grant.

Development of Advanced MRSA Case Detection and Reporting

Funded by PADOH as a sub-award, for public health researchers.

Development and Implementation of Automated Influenza Like Illness (ILI) Case Detector for Reporting Daily Fever and ILI Counts

Allegheny County Health Department.

Development of outbreak cluster detection algorithms using multi-data streams.

Development of biomedical research databases based on the framework of OpenMRS

Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC (Case Detection Project)

James Levin, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO)

2010

Allegheny County Health Department (Case Detection Project)

Ronald Voorhees, MD, Chief of Epidemiology and Biostatistics

2009-present

Ohio State Health Department (Grid Project)

Brian Fowler, MPH, Chief, Situational Monitoring and Event Detection Unit,

Center for Public Health Statistics and Informatics

2008-present

Pennsylvania State Health Department (Grid Project)

Kirsten Waller, MD, MPH,

2008-present

Tarrant County Health Department, TX (RODS Deployment)

Bill Stephens, Manager, Southwest Center for Advanced Public Health Practice

2005-present

City Houston Health Department, TX (RODS Deployment)

Jamyia Clark, Epidemiologist

2008-present

Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University (MedLEE Software)

Carol Friedman, Ph.D., Professor      

2007-present

Department of Meteorology, Penn State University (SCIPUFF Dispersion Model)

Sue Ellen Haupt, Ph.D., Professor     

2007-present

Recent Publications

Que J., and Tsui F.-C. Evaluation of Two Spatial Algorithms for Detection of Disease Outbreaks in Two States, AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2009 (in press).

Tsui F.-C., Sriburadej T.,  Sverchkov Y., Su H., and Espino J. Development of Security Infrastructure for Public Health Grid. 2009 Aug. 30-Sept. 30 PHIN Conference, Atlanta, GA.

Que J., Tsui F.-C., and Espino J., A Z-Score based multi-level spatial clustering algorithm for the detection of disease outbreaks, Biosecure 2008 Dec, LNCS 5354, pp. 108-118.

Que J. and Tsui F.-C. A multilevel spatial clustering algorithm for detection of disease outbreaks, AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2008 Nov 6:611-5. PMID: 18999304

Espino J., Hall K., White P., Washington D., Grant A., Hume A., Antonioletti M., Krause A., Jackson M., Tsui F.-C. and Heinbaugh W., Open-source Collaboration in Practice between RODS, NCPHI Research Lab, University of Edinburgh and Tarrant County Public Health,  2008 Aug. 24-28 PHIN Conference, Atlanta, GA.