Guoqian Jiang, M.D., Ph.D.

Guoqian Jiang, M.D., Ph.D., conducts research on biomedical terminologies and ontologies, data standards, and clinical study common data elements.

Dr. Jiang has specifically focused on these subareas:

• Quality auditing of large-scale biomedical terminologies and ontologies
• Quality evaluation of clinical study common data elements
• Developing and implementing innovative collaborative terminology authoring platforms leveraging Semantic Web technology
• Clinical phenotyping and clinical element models using electronic health records

Dr. Jiang is a member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). He served as a reviewer of a number of core journals and proceedings on biomedical informatics, and he also served as a member of scientific program committees for several national and international conferences and workshops.

Focus areas

Dr. Jiang has developed a series of novel approaches on medical ontology building and transformation, visualization, and quality auditing using formal concept analysis (FCA) techniques. Specifically, he developed the FCA-based approaches on:

• Auditing semantic completeness of SNOMED CT
• Formalizing the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) with the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP)
• Formalizing International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding rules
• Visualizing the ontologies in Protege frame and OWL models (see FCAViewTab)

Dr. Jiang has also developed an ICD ClaMLizer that provides a user interface for transforming the ICD-11 alpha contents in databases into a Classification Markup Language (ClaML) format.

In addition, Dr. Jiang had led a LexWiki project, which is a collaborative effort for developing a distributed terminology authoring platform based on semantic wiki techniques. The project is to support the collaborative terminology content development for:

• The World Health Organization's (WHO) ICD-11 revision project
• The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) BiomedGT project
• The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) Shared Health and Research Electronic Library (SHARE) project
• Mayo Clinic internal knowledge and vocabulary management projects

Currently, Dr. Jiang is leading an ADEpedia project, which is to build a scalable and standardized knowledge base of adverse drug events (ADEs) for drug safety surveillance.

Dr. Jiang is involved as a co-investigator in projects that include the:

• National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) Project
• CTSA Adverse Event Phenotype Ontology Project (ADE PHONT)
• Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN) Phenotype Ontology Project (PGRN PHONT)
• Electronic Medical Records & Genomics (eMERGE) Project
• Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) — Research Focus Area 4: Secondary Use of Electronic Health Record Data (SHARPn Project)
• Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid Vocabulary Knowledge Center (caBIG VKC)

Significance to patient care

Currently, clinical data and unstructured information from many providers is nonstandard. The ontologies and controlled terminologies provide the infrastructure for the transformation of nonstandard patient data into standards-conforming, comparable information suitable for large-scale analyses, inferencing and integration of disparate health data.

Dr. Jiang's research on biomedical informatics, particularly on building the infrastructure and innovative technologies to achieve high-quality biomedical terminologies and clinical data standards, will facilitate the standardization of electronic health records systems and improve the quality, safety and efficiency of health care.