BISI
Welcome to the Biostatistics and Medical Informatics research group's website.
Brussels Health Campus, Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Laarbeeklaan 103, 1090 JETTE - Brussel
The BISI research group is focused on the intersection between medical research, technology and statistics. Our research is most active in the areas of eHealth, modeling of medical data and medical instrumentation. BISI is also the main research group to support the consultancy group SQUARE.
BISI today
Today the BISI research group is managed by Ronald Buyl, Kurt Barbé and Diederik De Cock. All have a background in statistics, Ronald with his clinical experience focuses on eHealth, Kurt as a mathematician focuses on statistical processing and modeling of medical instrumentation and Diederik with his biomedical background focusses on epidemiology, all actively connect the VUB and UZ Brussel.
The BISI group further combines doctoral researchers and PhD's from different backgrounds among which are mathematics, biomedicine, computer science, and psychology.
Most members are actively involved in teaching, and/or actively support the core facility SQUARE that provides complementary support in methodology and statistics to the whole of our research community.
BISI history
The BISI research group was founded when the VUB manifested itself at the Brussels Health campus in Jette next to the universitary hospital UZ Brussel. Founding father and engineer Marc Nyssen positioned BISI in the domain of medical informatics with as key contribution the implementation of a nationwide Belgian electronic prescribing system. Joining forces with Leonard Kaufman, BISI further developed a focus on statistics to support clinical research in general and to enhance medical informatics in particular. Recognizing the importance of statistics for clinical research, researchers at the Brussels Health Campus quickly found their way to BISI for guidance and collaboration.
In 2017, Kurt Barbé initiated a formalization of the consultancy provided by Ronald Buyl and his team to support clinical research which led to a consultancy unit, the Interfaculty Center Data processing and Statistics (ICDS) which later turned into the VUB core facility Support for Quantitative and Qualitative Research (SQUARE).