Personal Home Page of Samson Tu

Work E-Mail Address: swt -at- stanford.edu (where "-at-" = "@")
E-Mail Address for Non-Work Correspondence: samsontu -at- gmail.com where ("-at-" = "@")

ORCID: 0000-0002-0295-7821

Affiliation
Emeritus Staff Retiree
Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research
Stanford University

Research/Professional Interests:

Modeling of biomedical ontologies and clinical guidelines and protocols, development of knowledge-based systems, knowledge representation, temporal database, and temporal reasoning, protocol-based health care

Personal Research Statement:

Trained in computer science (with specialization in artificial intelligence), my research focuses on the representation of biomedical knowledge and the development of computational methods to apply that knowledge to solve biomedical problems. Over the years, I have worked with clinicians to elicit, represent, and make computable clinical protocols and guidelines and medical terminologies. Technically, I focus on (1) the formal representation of and reasoning about biomedical concepts in ontologies, and (2) the development of algorithms to apply such representation in query systems and clinical decision support. I have worked on projects that use such models to drive protocol-based decision support and on projects where I developed novel representations for autism, clinical research, and ICD-11 concepts.

My work is done as part of the PROTEGE, ATHENA and other projects at Stanford and elsewhere. In these projects, we are looking at ontology development, meta-data representation, and protocols and guidelines in breast cancer care, diabetes, hypertension, and other disease areas.

More recently, I have been active in the World Health Organization's Family of International Classifications Network, serving as co-chair of the Informatics and Terminology Committee in the past and, more recently, the Mapping Task Force. I worked on the harmonized content model for the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), Health Interventions (ICHI), and Functioning Disability and Health (ICF). I led the effort to investigate issues related to harmonizing the content of the three classifications within the WHO-FIC Foundation.

Papers

References to Samson Tu's papers are available here.

Honors

2001   Best paper award, American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium, “A Virtual Medical Record for Guideline-Based Decision Support,” with Johnson, P.A., Musen, M.A., and Purve, I.

2003   Elected Fellow of American College of Medical Informatics

2013   Distinguished paper award, American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium, “Ontology-Based Federated Data Access to Human Studies Information,” with Sim, I., Carini, S. and other

Pictures

Past and Present

Personal Time Line

Interests:

Reading, travel, theater, arts, music, hiking, backpacking,

Last updated on 2026/01/05