Basic Information
- Course Code: DH-302
- Course Name: Introduction to Public Health Informatics
- Course Offered In: 2023-2024
- Semester Season: Autumn
- Instructors: Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan
- Prerequisites: None
- Difficulty (1 being easy and 5 being tough): 3
Course Content
The course content involves introduction to Health Informatics, CS software basics( like databases, SQL, network etc) , Health IT Systems & Health Information Exchange, Application of AI and ML in healthcare (through illustrated examples eg. MNIST dataset), Role of Ethics in Healthcare. Another major and perhaps the most intetesting part of this course involved the collaboration with the BetiC lab here in IITB as a part of course project in which we worked on real life problem statement and contribute to the ongoing progress. Our project was based on Smart Sthescope in which we worked on diagnosing the lung sound recorded by device real time through Resnet-18. The project was done in a group of 4 with mentors assigned from the BetiC lab.
Feedback on Lectures
The lectures were easy to follow and quite interactive. A lot of examples and real life implementations are discussed in the class that were asked in the exams later on. Once in a while we had few guest speakers as well who came and talked about their work. During our time, we had a session by Bahmni on EMR (Electronic Medical Records). Usually, the prof used to go through few colab notebooks in the class. Its recommended to go through them by yourself after class.
Feedback on Evaluations
Exam policy was as follows: Quiz 1 - 5 Assignment 1 - 10 Assignment 2 - 10 Project - 20 Midsem - 20 Endsem - 35
Written exam - 60%
Assignment/Project - 40%
Assignments were mostly in form of colab notebook and if you are familiar with ML and python it’s very easy to follow. Although enough resource is provided to do it from scratch as well.
Study Material and Resources
The lecture notes as well as all the google colab notebooks and going through them is enough for midsems and endsems.The Group Project formed a significant portion of our course so doing well in that is also important.
Follow-up Courses
This is one of the mandatory courses required if you want to pursue the Digital Healthcare minor offered by KCDH. Although this course is not a pre-requisite but interested students can take up courses like DH-304 (Economics of healthcare), DH-803 (Wearable Health Technologies) in future.
Final Takeaway
Overall this course was a very enlightening as you get to work with some real life problem statements in the domain of healthcare and even get to interact with industry experts through the guest speaker sessions. I’d suggest anyone interested to explore Healthcare or wanting to explore AI /ML in this field to take up the course.