CIM
Prof. Dr. Milan Zorman
CIMRS

Centre for Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Research and Studies at the Institute for complex and intelligent systems 

COIN
University of Maribor
Krekova 2
SI-2000 Maribor
Slovenia

Laboratory for System Design - LSD
University of Maribor,
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
Smetanova 17
SI-2000 Maribor
Slovenia
Tel.: +386 (0)2 220 7459
Fax: +386 (0)2 2511 178
Mobile: +386 (0)41 652 254
milan.zorman@uni-mb.si

The Centre for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research and studies (CIMRS)

The Centre for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research and studies (CIMRS) was founded in 1994 by University of Maribor and is a non–profit self-supporting scientific research institution. With establishment of CIMRS the basic conditions for collaboration between scientific research social sphere and macro-economics environment were set up, which is in agreement with the new scientific-technological European research policy.

CIMRS is structured to enable its members to pursue sustained high quality research programs, yet be flexible enough to enable and encourage multi-disciplined teams of academics to collaborate in joint research. The Centre is grouped into institutes and research units, with special independent scientific organization which have independent internal financial status.

CIMRS is within the framework of the University of Maribor the basic supporting organization for the broadest area of initiatives stimulating interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scientifically research activities, which contributes to Qualitative development of scientifically research activities of University of Maribor and

Creation of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduated studies programs.

Within the framework of its activities CIMRS expires for knowledge development and its broad accessibility and employability in society, transfer of research results, inform public about scenic-research achievements as well as science popularization and dissemination of scientific culture in Republic of Slovenia.

The institute for complex and intelligent systems (COINS)

COINS is among leading Slovenian research institutes in the field of intelligent and complex systems, software quality, e-learning, and medical informatics and nursing informatics. In the above fields COINS and its members has gained the international recognition and co - operates with many other leading European, Japan and USA institutions. The main research areas are:

-          basic research in novel intelligent systems, data mining and knowledge discovery approaches and their application in real world especially in the engineering, financial, medical and nursing fields,

-          the application of complexity, system and chaos theory in above fields,

-          engineering, medical and nursing information systems (including heterogeneous systems, systems for continuous care, etc), 

-          design methods and paradigms,

-          software quality,

-          the design of educational systems and e-learning.

COINS co-operates in numerous projects with different Slovenian institutions. Its mission is to perform world class research in the fields above and to transfer the research achievements into real world practice in the form of industrial projects, consulting activities, seminars and similar. The COINS members have the expertise and experience in EU projects like 5th FP programs PLANET, EUNITE and AgentLink, and EU Tempus, Socrates, Leonardo or similar programs.

Our experience related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases

Our experience related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases emerged from the co-operation with General Hospital Maribor and some eminent USA researchers, especially Dr. I. Litvan. We developed some new intelligent data analysis approaches for early diagnosing of Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases and data mining tools for knowledge extraction.

Curriculum Vitae of key members

Professor Peter Kokol obtained his bachelors degree in Engineering from University of Maribor and his Masters and Doctorate in Computer Science also from the University of Maribor. He joined the Department of Computer Science in University of Maribor as an assistant researcher 1982 where he is now a Full Professor and head of Laboratory of System Design and the head of Centre for Medical Informatics. From 1997 he is the head of Research Institute at the University College of Nursing Studies and from February 2001 the also the dean for research. Since January 2002 he is the Director of the independent Centre for Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies and Research. He has written over 300 technical and research papers published in recognised international journals and major conferences and co-authored some textbooks. He was the general or program chair of some major conferences, had numerous invited presentations and won several best papers awards.

His main research interests are intelligent systems, complex systems, system and chaos theory, software quality and metrics, and medical and nursing informatics. He has acted as principal investigator on numerous international and national research projects and he was the co-ordinator of the EU Phare Tempus projects ODIN and NICE. Currently he is the coordinator of the 5th framework project SQUFOL.

He had chaired international conferences and. He is a member of ACM, IEEE and ASIS and some IMIA technical committees. He is the President of the IEEE Committee on Computational Medicine and the member of national expert board of the World Bank project concerning health care standards in Slovenia.

Milan Zorman is a head of COINS. Milan Zorman obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Maribor in 1995 and his Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1999, also from the University of Maribor. He joined the Department of Computer Science in University of Maribor as an assistant researcher 1996 where he works now as a researcher and he is a Ph.D. in computer science. His main research interests are in intelligent systems, machine learning, hybrid systems and software engineering. He participates in several international and national research projects.

Mitja Lenic is a member of COINS research group. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Maribor in 1999 and his Ms.C degree in Computer Science in 2001, also from the University of Maribor. He joined the Department of Computer Science in University of Maribor as a technical collaborator in 1996, where he works now as a researcher. He has written and co-authored over 20 papers. His main research interests are in evolutionary computation, intelligent systems, automatic programming and software complexity metrics. He received several awards for his research activities. He participates in several international and national research projects.

Petra Povalej is a member of COINS research group. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree on the Faculty of Education, University of Maribor, program Mathematics and Computer Science, in 1999. She joined the LSD in 2002 as PhD student. Her current research interest are data mining, multi-agent systems, intelligent systems, medical informatics, nursing informatics, system theory, theory of complexity and chaos. She received the following awards: the best student paper award on CBMS ’02 in Maribor, Slovenia and the best poster award on SEAL ’02 in Singapore. She participates in several international and national research projects.

Prof. Bruno Stiglic. Advisor. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree on University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, 1957; M.Sc. in 1974 and Dr.Sci., University of Ljubljana, 1975. He joined the Institute of Communication Systems, Laboratory of electronic systems and medical applications, Ljubljana as R&D Assistant, 1955. In 1957 was promoted to R&D Engineer, in 1961 was elected Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, College of Electrotechnical Engineering, Maribor. He was elected to Associate Professor, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Maribor in 1975. He was elected to dean on Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Maribor in 1976, In 1978 he went to the industry as director of R&D Institute ISKRA Avtomatika, Ljubljana and was promoted to exec. VP R&D in 1982 and in 1985 exec. VP, R&D, ISKRA Electronics, Santa Clara, CA, USA. In 1989 he return to Faculty of Technical Sciences (1995 renamed to Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), University of Maribor. From 1995-1999 he was the head the Institute of Information Systems, was also Head of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems. He was elected to professor emeritus in 1999. Since 1989 he has more than 100 publications as author or co-author in different journals and papers on international conferences. His main research interests are information Systems, data base systems, knowledge based systems, use of intelligent systems in the field of medical diagnosis. He participates in several international and national research projects.

Intelligent data analysis and early diagnosing

Longitudinal, multinational and multiview studies generates huge amount of data, which normally can not be effectively analysed without automated methods. Intelligent data analysis and data mining are two approaches dealing with these matters and have recently gained a lot of attention also in medical fields. They enable us to automatically analyse complex and huge data or knowledge bases and extract new knowledge related to diagnosing, prediction, classification, hidden relation, etc.  The additional challenges of intelligent data analysis and data mining in the medical field are first to present the results of these two processes to medical staff in a simple human understandable form, and second to deal with noisy and uncertain data. Thereafter conventional techniques have to be modified and extended. In last ten years of intensive research we developed a lot of new hybrid approaches and used them with the success for prediction, early diagnosing and knowledge extraction, also on the databases with cases of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases but much remains to be done. Our research will adapt our existing approaches and develop new ones to deal with the special requirements of the studies done in the project. These approaches will be used to find hidden relations, extract new knowledge, automatically set or prove hypotheses, enable early diagnosing, predict outcomes, classify results of clinical trials and animal experiments, find new preventive activities. Another task of the group will be to set the information and management support for studies, experiments, test, clinical trials, data warehousing, etc. Yet another task will be to build intelligent tutoring and consulting systems helping citizens and patients to learn preventive activities.

With our healthcare partners we also intend to organise activities for data collection for other subgroups. 

References:

UoM1 KOKOL, Peter, ZORMAN, Milan, MEDOŠ, Tanja. Decision trees - a CMI tool in nursing education. Aust. electron. j. nurs. educ., 1999, vol. 4, št. 2, [7 str.]. [COBISS.SI-ID 4331286]

UoM2 KOKOL, Peter, ZAZULA, Damjan, BRUMEC, Viljem, KOLENC, Ljudmila. Nursing informatics education for the next millenium. FGCS, Future gener. comput. syst.. [Print ed.], 1999, vol. 15, no. 2, str. 211-216. [COBISS.SI-ID 242596]

UoM3 KOKOL, Peter, WELZER-DRUŽOVEC, Tatjana. Some ideas about intelligent medical system design. Health inform. Eur., 1999, 5 str. http://www. hi-europe.info/files/1998_9/imsd_kokol_etal.htm. [COBISS.SI-ID 4860182]

UoM4 ZORMAN, Milan, PODGORELEC, Vili, KOKOL, Peter. Using intelligent search for finding medical sites. Health inform. Eur., 7 str. http://www. hi-europe.info/files/1998_9/int_med_search.htm. [COBISS.SI-ID 4216854]

UoM5 HABJANIČ, Ana, KOKOL, Peter, ZORMAN, Milan, ŠLAJMER-JAPELJ, Majda. CArE: a software package for computer-aided nurse education. Health inform. j., 1999, vol. 5, no. 3, str. 119-123. [COBISS.SI-ID 5012758]

UoM6 KOKOL, Peter, PODGORELEC, Vili, ZORMAN, Milan, KOKOL, Tatjana, NJIVAR, Tatjana. Computer and natural language texts - a comparison based on long-range correlations. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.. [Print ed.], 1999, vol. 50, no. 14, str. 1295-1301. [COBISS.SI-ID 5038102]

UoM7 ZORMAN, Milan, PODGORELEC, Vili, KOKOL, Peter. Using intelligent search for finding medical sites. Med Inform Internet Med, 1999, vol. 24, no. 3, str. 213-221. [COBISS.SI-ID 5161750]

UoM8 ŠPROGAR, Matej, KOKOL, Peter, HLEB BABIČ, Špela, PODGORELEC, Vili, ZORMAN, Milan. Vector decision trees. Intelligent data analysis. [Print ed.], 2000, vol. 4, no. 3,4, str. 305-321. [COBISS.SI-ID 5904918]

UoM9 PODGORELEC, Vili, BREST, Janez, KOKOL, Peter. Power of heterogeneous computing as a vehicle for implementing E[sup]3 medical decision support systems. International journal of medical informatics. [Print ed.], 2000, vol. 58-59, str. 179-190. [COBISS.SI-ID 5748758]

UoM10 HLEB BABIČ, Špela, KOKOL, Peter, PODGORELEC, Vili, ZORMAN, Milan, ŠPROGAR, Matej, MOLAN ŠTIGLIC, Milojka. The art of building decision trees. J. med. syst., 2000, vol. 24, no. 1, str. 43. [COBISS.SI-ID 5621782]

UoM11 KOKOL, Peter, PODGORELEC, Vili, HABRIAS, Henri, RABIA, Nassim Hadj. Ranking the complexity of niam conceptual schemas by alpha metric. SIGPLAN not., Mar. 2000, vol. 35, no. 3, str. 59-64. [COBISS.SI-ID 5401622]

UoM12 KOKOL, Peter, PODGORELEC, Vili, CARDOSO, Ana Isabel, DION, Francis. Assesing the state of the software process development using the chaos theory. Softw. eng. notes, May 2000, vol. 25, no. 3, str. 41-43. [COBISS.SI-ID 5572118]

UoM13 ZORMAN, Milan, PODGORELEC, Vili, KOKOL, Peter, PETERSON, Margaret, ŠPROGAR, Matej, OJSTERŠEK, Milan. Finding the right decision tree's induction strategy for a hard real world problem. International journal of medical informatics. [Print ed.], 2001, 63, str. 109-121. [COBISS.SI-ID 6583062]

UoM14 PODGORELEC, Vili, KOKOL, Peter. Towards more optimal medical diagnosing with evolutionary algorithms. J. med. syst., 2001, vol. 25, no. 3, str. 195-219. [COBISS.SI-ID 6522902]

UoM15 POVALEJ, Petra, KOKOL, Peter. Alternative approach to determine blood lipids with intelligent systems. Health inform. Eur., [10 f.]. http://www. hi-europe.info/files/2002/9975-lipids.pdf. [COBISS.SI-ID 7284502]

UoM16 PODGORELEC, Vili, KOKOL, Peter. Evolutionary induced decision trees for dangerous software modules prediction. Inf. process. lett.. [Print ed.], 2002, vol. 82, str. 31-38. [COBISS.SI-ID 6977814]

UoM17 PODGORELEC, Vili, KOKOL, Peter, STIGLIC, Bruno, ROZMAN, Ivan. Decision trees: an overview and their use in medicine. J. med. syst., Oct. 2002, vol. 26, no. 5, str. 445-463. [COBISS.SI-ID 7565846]

UoM18 PIGHIN, Maurizio, PODGORELEC, Vili, KOKOL, Peter. Fault-threshold prediction with linear programming methodologies. Empirical software engineering, 2003, vol. 8, iss. 2, str. 117-138. [COBISS.SI-ID 7948310]

UoM19 POVALEJ, Petra, LENIČ, Mitja, ZORMAN, Milan, KOKOL, Peter, LHOTSKA, Lenka, PIŠOT, Rado. Machine learning helps physicians in diagnosing of mitral valve prolapse. Health informatics Europe. [Online ed.], 2003, 29/10, 8 str. http://www.hi-europe.info/files/2003/mitralvalveprolapse.pdf. [COBISS.SI-ID 607187]

UoM20 POVALEJ, Petra, LENIČ, Mitja, KOKOL, Peter. Combining multiple specialists' opinions with cellular automata to improve medical decision making. WSEAS Trans. Comput., 2004, vol. 3, iss. 6, str. 2089-2093. [COBISS.SI-ID 9306902]

UoM21 ŠTIGLIC, Gregor, KOKOL, Peter. Rule-based microarray classification system using multi-agent approach. WSEAS Trans. Comput., 2004, vol. 3, iss. 6, str. 2098-2101. [COBISS.SI-ID 9307414]

UoM22 KRIŽMARIĆ, Miljenko, KOKOL, Peter, KAMENIK, Mirt, MIČETIĆ-TURK, Dušanka. Using neural networks for prediction of central venous pressure during open-heart surgery. WSEAS Trans. Comput., 2004, vol. 3, iss. 6, str. 2124-2127. [COBISS.SI-ID 9307926]

UoM23 ŠTIGLIC, Gregor, KOKOL, Peter. Analysis of gene expresion data using evolutionary multi-agent system. WSEAS Trans. Syst., 2004, vol. 3, iss. 2, str. 880-883. [COBISS.SI-ID 8679446]

UoM24 KOKOL, Peter, HLEB BABIČ, Špela, PODGORELEC, Vili, ZORMAN, Milan, ŠPROGAR, Matej. The centre for medical informatics at the University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia. Health inform. Eur., [2 str.]. Dostopno na Internetu (URL): http://hi-europe.co. uk/who/cmimaribor.htm. [COBISS.SI-ID 4330774]

UoM25 KOKOL, Peter. Improving nursing education with intelligent systems : Elektronska publikacija. On-Line Journal of Nursing Informatics (OJNI), 7 str. http://www. eaa-knowledge.com/ojni/ni/8_1/kokol.htm. [COBISS.SI-ID 8583702]