TRIAD: The Translational Research Informatics and Data Management Grid

P. Payne; D. Ervin; R. Dhaval; T. Borlawsky; A. Lai

doi:10.4338/ACI-2011-02-RA-0014

Applied Clinical Informatics, Table of Contents

Appl Clin Inform 2011; 02(03): 331-344
DOI: 10.4338/ACI-2011-02-RA-0014

Research Article

Schattauer GmbH

TRIAD: The Translational Research Informatics and Data Management Grid

Authors

P. Payne

¹The Ohio State University, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Center for IT Innovations in Healthcare, and Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Columbus, OH
D. Ervin

¹The Ohio State University, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Center for IT Innovations in Healthcare, and Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Columbus, OH
R. Dhaval

¹The Ohio State University, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Center for IT Innovations in Healthcare, and Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Columbus, OH
T. Borlawsky

¹The Ohio State University, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Center for IT Innovations in Healthcare, and Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Columbus, OH
A. Lai

¹The Ohio State University, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Center for IT Innovations in Healthcare, and Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Columbus, OH

Abstract

Summary

Objective: Multi-disciplinary and multi-site biomedical research programs frequently require infrastructures capable of enabling the collection, management, analysis, and dissemination of heterogeneous, multi-dimensional, and distributed data and knowledge collections spanning organizational boundaries. We report on the design and initial deployment of an extensible biomedical informatics platform that is intended to address such requirements.

Methods: A common approach to distributed data, information, and knowledge management needs in the healthcare and life science settings is the deployment and use of a service-oriented a>rchitecture (SOA). Such SOA technologies provide for strongly-typed, semantically annotated, and stateful data and analytical services that can be combined into data and knowledge integration and analysis “pipelines.” Using this overall design pattern, we have implemented and evaluated an extensible SOA platform for clinical and translational science applications known as the Translational Research Informatics and Data-management grid (TRIAD). TRIAD is a derivative and extension of the caGrid middleware and has an emphasis on supporting agile “working interoperability” between data, information, and knowledge resources.

Results: Based upon initial verification and validation studies conducted in the context of a collection of driving clinical and translational research problems, we have been able to demonstrate that TRIAD achieves agile “working interoperability” between distributed data and knowledge sources.

Conclusion: Informed by our initial verification and validation studies, we believe TRIAD provides an example instance of a lightweight and readily adoptable approach to the use of SOA technologies in the clinical and translational research setting. Furthermore, our initial use cases illustrate the importance and efficacy of enabling “working interoperability” in heterogeneous biomedical environments.

Keywords

Clinical research informatics - data access - data integration - data analysis - standards - workflow - socio-organizational issues

Full Text

References

References
1 Foster I. Service-oriented science. Science 2005; 308 5723 814-817.
2 Oster S, Langella S, Hastings S, Ervin D, Madduri R, Phillips J. et al. caGrid 1.0: An enterprise grid infrastructure for biomedical research. JAMIA 2008; 15 (02) 138-149.
3 Buetow K. An infrastructure for interconnecting research institutions. Drug Discovery Today 2009; 14 11–12 605-610.
4 Embi PJ, Payne PR. Clinical research informatics: challenges, opportunities and definition for an emerging domain. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2009; 16 (03) 316-327.
5 Sung NS, Crowley Jr WF, Genel M, Salber P, Sandy L, Sherwood LM. et al. Central challenges facing the national clinical research enterprise. JAMA 2003; 289 (010) 1278-1287.
6 Butte AJ. Translational bioinformatics: coming of age. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2008; 15 (06) 709-714.
7 Zerhouni EA. Translational research: moving discovery to practice. Nature 2007; 81 (01) 126-128.
8 UK Cancer Grid.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://www.cancergrid.org.
9 Foster I, Kesselman CST. The anatomy of the grid: enabling scalable virtual organizations. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 2001; 15 (03) 200-222.
10 caBIG Program.. [cited 2011 Februrary 14]; Available from: https://cabig.nci.nih.gov.
11 BIRN Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://www.birncommunity.org.
12 SHRINE Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://catalyst.harvard.edu/shrine.
13 Weber GM, Murphy SN, McMurry AJ, MacFadden D, Nigrin DJ, Churchill S. et al. The Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE): A prototype federated query tool for clinical data repositories. JAMIA 2009; 16: 624-630.
14 NHIN Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: healthit.hhs.gov.
15 Kawamoto K, Lobach DF, Willard HF, Ginsburg GS. A national clinical decision support infrastructure to enable the widespread and consistent practice of genomic and personalized medicine. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 2009 9(16).
16 Globus Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://www.globus.org.
17 CLL Research Consortium.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://cll.ucsd.edu.
18 Park J, Ram S. Information systems interoperability: What lies beneath?. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2004; 22 (04) 595-632.
19 i2b2 Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: https://http://www.i2b2.org.
20 REDCap Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://project-redcap.org.
21 caBIG.. caGrid Portal. Bethesda, MA: National Cancer Institute;; 2010. [cited 2010 July 22, 2010]; Available from: http://cagrid.org/display/portal/Home.
22 Borlawsky T, Dhaval R, Hastings S, Payne PR. Development of an agile knowledge engineering framework in support of multi-disciplinary translational research. 2009 AMIA Translational Bioinformatics Summit; San Francisco: American Medical Informatics Association; 2009
23 Foster I, Kesselman C. The Grid 2: Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure. 2nd ed. New York: Morgan Kaufman; 2003
24 openMDR Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://cagrid.org/display/MDR.
25 Pathak J, Solbrig HR, Buntrock JD, Johnson TM, Chute CG. LexGrid: A framework for representing, storing, and querying biomedical terminologies from simple to sublime. JAMIA 2009; 16 (03) 305-315.
26 Enterprise Architect 8. SPARX Systems; 2010.
27 Health Ontology Mapper Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: www.healthontologymapper.org/home.
28 Brandt CA, Argraves S, Money R, Ananth G, Trocky NM, Nadkarni PM. Informatics tools to improve clinical research study implementation. Contemporary clinical trials 2006; 27 (02) 112-122.
29 Chung TK, Kukafka R, Johnson SB. Reengineering clinical research with informatics. J Investig Med 2006; 54 (06) 327-333.
30 Payne PR, Johnson SB, Starren JB, Tilson HH, Dowdy D. Breaking the translational barriers: the value of integrating biomedical informatics and translational research. J Investig Med 2005; 53 (04) 192-200.
31 TRIAD Project.. [cited 2011 February 14]; Available from: http://www.triadcommunity.org.