Our health experts showcase their work at Expo 2020 Dubai

Not even international border closures can stop us!

Continued investment in digital health infrastructure and health services is a priority for the Australian Government and other governments around the globe post COVID and beyond.

CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre (AEHRC) plays a prominent role in setting agendas for e-Health and developing technologies that can be used to expand e-Health capability.

Over the past week researchers from AEHRC presented a series of workshops and panels showcasing their work through the Australia Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai.

This hybrid event represented an opportunity for AEHRC to exhibit its world-class technology and advances in digital health to strengthen existing relationships with Austrade and attract new investors and research partners.

AEHRC’s participation was kicked off by a live panel featuring Kate Ebrill, Michael Lawley and CEO David Hansen. The trio discussed Ontoserver, AEHRC’s clinical terminology server, which underpins the national terminology service of the NHS, England, Wales, Netherlands and Australia. Ontoserver supports the standardisation of clinical language, enabling health systems to speak with one another so data can be smoothly and more efficiently exchanged.

Following this, Denis Bauer and David Hansen featured at the Expo event, “Conference on Breakthroughs and Perspectives in Genomic Medicine”. Denis is an internationally recognised expert in artificial intelligence and her lecture looked at the multiple ways genomic information can speed up the diagnosis of heritable and infectious diseases when assisted by technologies that her team develops, which extract clinically relevant insights from huge volumes of data. She gave examples of how her team’s novel bioinformatics approaches can help identify diseases such as motor neurone disease, cardiovascular disease and how they can also track new strains of the COVID-19 virus.

David illuminated the complexity of AI technologies, first by making a persuasive case for the adoption of AI technologies in health, then unfolding some of the key health IT trends and showcasing how the AEHRC not only speaks to the trends in terms of what they create but also establishes future trends.

Finally, AEHRC researchers Teresa Wozniak and Anthony Nguyen and colleagues from the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) mission, Branwen Morgan, Helmut Thissen and Brad Hine presented a fascinating five speaker lecture that established the compelling need for more research into AMR, one of the key future threats to animal and human health, and outlining some of the areas CSIRO scientists are working on within AMR, including in animal and human health, and human health systems.

For more information on our involvement with Expo 2020 Dubai visit: Expo 2020 Dubai – CSIRO