Harvard-MIT OpenCourseWare

The Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology has reading lists, course information, articles and lecture notes online to be able to enhance your education on medical topics. MIT OpenCourseWare provides free publication of MIT course materials that reflect the subjects taught at MIT-http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Health-Sciences-and-Technology/ . For example, the Lecture Notes on Biomedical Information Technology at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Biological-Engineering/20-453JSpring-2005/LectureNotes/index.htm enables one to get a quick education based on the following from the syllabus:

"The objective of this subject is to teach the design of contemporary information systems for biological and medical data. These data are growing at a prodigious rate, and new information systems are required. This subject will cover examples from biology and medicine to illustrate complete life cycle information systems, beginning with data acquisition, following to data storage and finally to retrieval and analysis. Design of appropriate databases, client-server strategies, data interchange protocols, and computational modeling architectures will be covered. Students are expected to have some familiarity with scientific application software and a basic understanding of at least one contemporary programming language (C, C++, Java®, Lisp, Perl, Python, etc.)."

Other courses include Biomedical Signal and Image Processing,-http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Health-Sciences-and-Technology/HST-582JSpring-2007/CourseHome/index.htm and for the purposes here Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging:Data Acquistion and Analysis at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Health-Sciences-and-Technology/HST-583Fall-2006/CourseHome/index.htm . I particularly liked the labs with slides and software.

There are also graduate courses at the Sloan School of Management and the Time Series analysis courses at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/14-384Fall-2007/CourseHome/index.htm with references to Bayesian and Markov Chain Monte Carlo. The wealth of organized information here provides an in-depth, state-of-the-art and quality education for free as well as a contact network to do high quality research.