The LIMICS team (UMRS 1142) is a research team jointly depending upon 3 French public institutions: the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), the “Université Pierre et Marie Curie” (UPMC), and the “Université Paris 13” (UP13). Led by Marie-Christine Jaulent, research director at INSERM, the LIMICS lab is specialized in medical informatics and knowledge engineering for e-health. Its research areas are mainly in the fields of 1) knowledge engineering, 2) model engineering, 3) decision support systems based on clinical practice guidelines or on case-based reasoning approaches, and 4) public health and clinical research informatics.
The LIMICS has proposed innovative computerized methods to manage data and complex knowledge in healthcare and to develop decision support systems for improving biomedical research, care quality and patient safety. Our approach is characterized by the inclusion of the semantic dimension (conceptual knowledge). The coding and sharing of diverse types of information from heterogeneous sources, the extraction of new knowledge and the introduction of that knowledge into computer systems capable of reasoning to provide support for medical decisions for maximal benefit to the patients, require above all the ability to share meaning. In the last five years, we have focused principally on the representation and management of qualitative medical knowledge, for knowledge sharing and decision-making support.
The diversity of our projects reflects the broad field of application of these methods. As a result, the projects carried out by the team fall into diverse contexts in terms of usage, for instance: detection of a pharmacovigilance signal, assistance with the coding of patients' medical records, computerisation of clinical practice guidelines, assistance with prescription, building nation-wide information systems for epidemiology, research, and support for care coordination (in the rare disease field).
The current synthesis of the group consists of 29 professors and full-time researchers, 10 post-doc and engineers and 9 PhD candidates. It constitutes a multi-disciplinary team of Computer Scientists, Medical Doctors, and Pharmacists. The team has a close collaboration with AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris), which is the most important French University Hospital Organization with 38 hospitals.
Since 2001, the team has published around 550 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, books and conference proceedings.
