Speaker
Prof.
Richard McClatchey
(University of the West of England)
Description
The Health-e-Child (HeC) project is an EC Framework Programme 6 Integrated Project
that aims at developing an integrated healthcare platform for paediatrics. Through
this platform biomedical informaticians will integrate heterogeneous data and perform
epidemiological studies across Europe.
The main objective of the project is to gain a comprehensive view of a child's health
by ‘vertically’ integrating biomedical, information and knowledge that spans the
entire spectrum from genetic to epidemiological. The resulting Grid enabled
biomedical information platform will be supported by robust search, optimization and
matching techniques for information collected in hospitals across Europe.
In particular, paediatricians will be provided with decision support, knowledge
discovery and disease modelling applications that will access data in hospitals in
the UK, Italy and France, integrated via the Grid. For economy of scale, reusability,
extensibility, and maintainability, Health-e-Child is being developed on top of an
EGEE/gLite based infrastructure that provides all the common data and computation
management services required by the applications. The emphasis of the Health-e-Child
effort is on universality of information, person-centricity of information,
universality of application, multiplicity and variety of biomedical analytics and
person-centricity of interaction. Its corner stone is the integration of information
across biomedical abstraction whereby layers of biomedical information (i.e.,
genetic, cell, tissue, organ, individual, and population layer) are integrated to
provide a unified view of a person’s biomedical and clinical condition.
This paper discusses the major issues and challenges in bio-medical data integration
and how these will be resolved in the Health-e-Child system. It establishes the need
for the HeC infrastructure and emphasises the importance of user requirements
analysis when integrating highly heterogeneous medical information. HeC is presented
as an example of how computer science originating from the high energy physics
community can be adapted for use by biomedical informaticians to deliver tangible
real-world benefits.
| Submitted on behalf of Collaboration (ex, BaBar, ATLAS) | Health-e-Child Grid project |
|---|
Primary author
Prof.
Richard McClatchey
(University of the West of England)
Co-authors
Dr
Ashiq Anjum
(UWE)
Dr
Ian Willers
(CMS)
