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Claudio Eccher
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Research
Since 1997 I have carried out research in Telemedicine, Medical informatics, and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (Intelligent Electronic Medical Records, Web-based Systems for supporting the Health Care Professionals' Collaborative Work, Decision Support Systems in pathology and dermatology). Currently I am working on the translation of ASBRU in CLIPS and the design of modules allowing to integrate a guideline/treamtent plan-based decision support system into an oncological medical record.
PhD thesis work
In my PhD thesis I addressed the automatic translation of Systems Biology Mark-Up Language (SBML) models of network of biochemical reactions into the Biochemical Stochastic pi-calculus. SBML is XML-based widespread exchange language for systems biology. The Biochemical Stochastic pi-calculus can describe the concurrency of a network of biochemical reactions. Available tools allow to simulate pi-calculus models to obtain qualitative as well as quantitative results, but the translation from SBML into a process algebra requires a level of encoding detail that deters biologists from performing the conversion. To perform an automatic translation we define the assumptions and the formal rules that allow the unsupervised definition of pi-calculus specifications from SBML models lacking formality and biological information. I designed and developed SBML2PI, an automatic translation tool written in Java, that implements the translation rules. To test the translation process we present and discuss the results of the simulations performed on two models translated with our tool. The simulation results are in excellent agreement, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the literature. I discussed some problems that remain open and suggest possible solutions that need further investigation.