In 21st-century medicine, decisions are data-driven. With scientists and clinicians generating data in unprecedented amounts, health professionals must manage information to make it meaningful. The Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI), led by Joel Saltz, MD, PhD, is playing a critical role in initiatives to translate, integrate, share and analyze information that will improve medical diagnosis, treatment and patient outcomes.
Biomedical Informatics Support Program highlights of 2006:
- BMI is shaping the development of cancer informatics technologies at the national and local levels. The goal of the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™) is to develop applications and the underlying systems architecture that connect data, tools, scientists and organizations in an open federated environment. The BMI middleware group developed caGrid, middleware that allows sharing of data and analytical tools among cancer researchers. caGrid has been adopted for imaging, clinical trials, tissue banking and high-throughput molecular studies. The in vivo imaging group has developed software for reviewing and analyzing radiology and pathology images.
- BMI’s medical informatics team developed Quest, a database- independent application to support ad hoc query development for Ohio State’s Integrated Cancer Biology Program (ICBP) group. This application is integratable with other software tools, such as Bioconductor, R, and Gene-Pattern. BMI’s middleware group will deploy caGrid to the national ICBP group to coordinate research among ICBP centers.
- BMI is a leader in imaging informatics – creating tools, algorithms and technologies to share and analyze biomedical image data. One emphasis is on algorithm development for clinical image analysis and automated classification of different cancers. A second focus is on using image analysis to quantitatively characterize the phenotypic features at molecular, cellular and tissue levels in 2-D and 3-D spaces in breast cancer and the tumor microenvironment.
- BMI’s work in systems biology/bioinformatics ranges from mapping the spread of the avian flu virus to analyzing gene regulation. Research to plot the course of H5N1, a dangerous form of avian flu, used the online mapping program Google Earth and has received international attention. Researchers hope this information will help predict where the next outbreak of the virus may occur.
- BMI is expanding the systems biology area through the joint recruitment (with Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center) of Jeffrey Parvin, MD, PhD, from Harvard University. This expansion will focus on using many data sources to discover and analyze biochemical processes in such areas as breast cancer. Computational and lab-based scientists will collaborate to identify critical steps in carcinogenesis.
- BMI initiated a program in Clinical and Translational Research Informatics. Philip Payne, PhD, was recruited in a joint appointment with Ohio State’s MedCenter IS group to serve as both a BMI faculty member and in a new position as translational research informatics architect for the Medical Center. He will research knowledge engineeringbased approaches to the design of informatics platforms supporting the discovery, integration and analysis of phenotypic, bio-molecular and research operations data. He will also shape translational research information systems in the context of his Medical Center duties.
- BMI’s high-end computing group extended its work in combinatorial algorithms and parallel computing. Combinatorial algorithms are an enabling technology for scientific computing, especially for large-scale problems and high performance. These techniques are improving computational performance in pathology image analysis and will be applied to statistical genetics and detection of genetic interactions to predict genetic risk.
