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5 Publications visible to you, out of a total of 5

Abstract (Expand)

The German Medical Informatics Initiative has agreed on a HL7 FHIR-based core data set as the common data model that all 37 university hospitals use for their patient's data. These data are stored locally at the site but are centrally queryable for researchers and accessible upon request. This infrastructure is currently under construction, and its functionality is being tested by so-called Projectathons. In the 6th Projectathon, a clinical hypothesis was formulated, executed in a multicenter scenario, and its results were analyzed. A number of oddities emerged in the analysis of data from different sites. Biometricians, who had previously performed analyses in prospective data collection settings such as clinical trials or cohorts, were not consistently aware of these idiosyncrasies. This field report describes data quality problems that have occurred, although not all are genuine errors. The aim is to point out such circumstances of data generation that may affect statistical analysis.

Authors: M. Lobe, C. Draeger, A. Strubing, J. Palm, F. A. Meineke, A. Winter

Date Published: 12th Sep 2023

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

BACKGROUND: Clinical trials, epidemiological studies, clinical registries, and other prospective research projects, together with patient care services, are main sources of data in the medical research domain. They serve often as a basis for secondary research in evidence-based medicine, prediction models for disease, and its progression. This data are often neither sufficiently described nor accessible. Related models are often not accessible as a functional program tool for interested users from the health care and biomedical domains. OBJECTIVE: The interdisciplinary project Leipzig Health Atlas (LHA) was developed to close this gap. LHA is an online platform that serves as a sustainable archive providing medical data, metadata, models, and novel phenotypes from clinical trials, epidemiological studies, and other medical research projects. METHODS: Data, models, and phenotypes are described by semantically rich metadata. The platform prefers to share data and models presented in original publications but is also open for nonpublished data. LHA provides and associates unique permanent identifiers for each dataset and model. Hence, the platform can be used to share prepared, quality-assured datasets and models while they are referenced in publications. All managed data, models, and phenotypes in LHA follow the FAIR principles, with public availability or restricted access for specific user groups. RESULTS: The LHA platform is in productive mode (https://www.health-atlas.de/). It is already used by a variety of clinical trial and research groups and is becoming increasingly popular also in the biomedical community. LHA is an integral part of the forthcoming initiative building a national research data infrastructure for health in Germany.

Authors: T. Kirsten, F. Meineke, H. Loffler-Wirth, A. Uciteli, C. Beger, S. Staubert, M. Lobe, R. Hansel, F. G. Rauscher, J. C. Schuster, T. Peschel, H. Herre, J. Wagner, S. Zachariae, C. Engel, M. Scholz, E. Rahm, H. Binder, M. Loffler

Date Published: 3rd Aug 2022

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

Sharing data is of great importance for research in medical sciences. It is the basis for reproducibility and reuse of already generated outcomes in new projects and in new contexts. FAIR data principles are the basics for sharing data. The Leipzig Health Atlas (LHA) platform follows these principles and provides data, describing metadata, and models that have been implemented in novel software tools and are available as demonstrators. LHA reuses and extends three different major components that have been previously developed by other projects. The SEEK management platform is the foundation providing a repository for archiving, presenting and secure sharing a wide range of publication results, such as published reports, (bio)medical data as well as interactive models and tools. The LHA Data Portal manages study metadata and data allowing to search for data of interest. Finally, PhenoMan is an ontological framework for phenotype modelling. This paper describes the interrelation of these three components. In particular, we use the PhenoMan to, firstly, model and represent phenotypes within the LHA platform. Then, secondly, the ontological phenotype representation can be used to generate search queries that are executed by the LHA Data Portal. The PhenoMan generates the queries in a novel domain specific query language (SDQL), which is specific for data management systems based on CDISC ODM standard, such as the LHA Data Portal. Our approach was successfully applied to represent phenotypes in the Leipzig Health Atlas with the possibility to execute corresponding queries within the LHA Data Portal.

Authors: A. Uciteli, C. Beger, J. Wagner, A. Kiel, F. A. Meineke, S. Staubert, M. Lobe, R. Hansel, J. Schuster, T. Kirsten, H. Herre

Date Published: 24th May 2021

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract

Not specified

Authors: D. Petroff, O. Batz, K. Jedrysiak, J. Kramer, T. Berg, J. Wiegand

Date Published: 5th Apr 2020

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

BACKGROUND: For analysis of the tumor microenvironment in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) tissue samples, it is desirable to obtain information about counts and distribution of different macrophage subtypes. Until now, macrophage counts are mostly inferred from gene expression analysis of whole tissue sections, providing only indirect information. Direct analysis of immunohistochemically (IHC) fluorescence stained tissue samples is confronted with several difficulties, e.g. high variability of shape and size of target macrophages and strongly inhomogeneous intensity of staining. Consequently, application of commercial software is largely restricted to very rough analysis modes, and most macrophage counts are still obtained by manual counting in microarrays or high power fields, thus failing to represent the heterogeneity of tumor microenvironment adequately. METHODS: We describe a Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) filter based segmentation approach for whole tissue samples, combining floating intensity thresholding and rule-based feature detection. Method is validated against manual counts and compared with two commercial software kits (Tissue Studio 64, Definiens AG, and Halo, Indica Labs) and a straightforward machine-learning approach in a set of 50 test images. Further, the novel method and both commercial packages are applied to a set of 44 whole tissue sections. Outputs are compared with gene expression data available for the same tissue samples. Finally, the ROF based method is applied to 44 expert-specified tumor subregions for testing selection and subsampling strategies. RESULTS: Among all tested methods, the novel approach is best correlated with manual count (0.9297). Automated detection of evaluation subregions proved to be fully reliable. Comparison with gene expression data obtained for the same tissue samples reveals only moderate to low correlation levels. Subsampling within tumor subregions is possible with results almost identical to full sampling. Mean macrophage size in tumor subregions is 152.5+/-111.3 mum(2). CONCLUSIONS: ROF based approach is successfully applied to detection of IHC stained macrophages in DLBCL tissue samples. The method competes well with existing commercial software kits. In difference to them, it is fully automated, externally repeatable, independent on training data and completely documented. Comparison with gene expression data indicates that image morphometry constitutes an independent source of information about antibody-polarized macrophage occurence and distribution.

Authors: M. Wagner, R. Hansel, S. Reinke, J. Richter, M. Altenbuchinger, U. D. Braumann, R. Spang, M. Loffler, W. Klapper

Date Published: 16th Jul 2019

Publication Type: Journal

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