Jean-François Ethier - MD CM, PhD, FRCPC

Associate researcher

I’m an attending physician in the Internal Medicine division as well as an assistant professor at Sherbrooke University in the departments of medicine and informatics. I’m also an associate researcher in the UMRS 1138 team 22.

Advanced methods relying on reference ontologies are now required to integrate the various resources necessary for today’s translational research. More specifically, these methods must support semantic interoperability between various systems, organize and structure biomedical data warehouses and relate heterogeneous data (structurally, geographically and terminologically). They must also support reasoning based on emerging semantic web techniques as well as provide a backbone or efficient and reliable decision support systems. These activities are core to translational research and so are of utmost importance for fundamental research, clinical research and ultimately patient care since those methods support information transfers between the three poles. The concept linking all of this together is the learning health system (LHS).

By representing concepts from a given domain in a formal and explicit way, ontologies allow a unified representation of heterogeneous data sources and enable semantic reasoning based on these data sources. We take a translational point of view when approaching our research, covering integration of various data types, including medical (patient care data), research (genomic, proteomic, but also clinical research) and patient provided data (ex fitbit). Our goal is to structure, facilitate and accelerate efficient and reliable bidirectional information streams to foster innovative discoveries.

Specialties: health and biomedical informatics, e-health, connected health, ontologies, biomedical terminologies, clinical informatics.