The CardioVascular Research Grid (CVRG) and Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) are partnering to create an infrastructure for sharing cardiovascular data and data analysis tools, both organizations announced today.
The relationship will help CVRG, an $8.5 million (federal funding), digital network, to fulfill its mission of creating a software grid through which researchers worldwide can easily exchange data, images and expertise on heart-related illnesses. Based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, the CVRG aims to use digital tools to find new ways to prevent, detect and treat life-threatening cardiac ailments.
The initiative will enable CVRG to use computational resources more efficiently, evaluate multiple analytical algorithms simultaneously, and save time by avoiding redundancies in analytic workflows. Components will include leveraging BIRN’s competencies with the Taverna workflow management software to orchestrate CVRG web services based workflows better.
In addition, BIRN will assist with data integration of the CVRG imaging platform. BIRN will tap its capabilities in information integration research, including the USC Information Sciences Institute’s world-class artificial intelligence expertise, and its close partnership with the Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration service (OGSA-DAI).
Benefits to CVRG will include a comprehensive view of multi-modal data and metadata repositories, including primary data from scanners, derived data, data produced by analytics algorithms, and metadata.
Funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH, the CVRG supports national and international multi-institutional collaborations in cardiovascular science, and builds on and extends tools developed in the caBIG and BIRN data-sharing infrastructure projects. Directed by the Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins, the CVRG also includes the Center for Comprehensive Informatics at Emory University. Dr. Raimond Winslow, PI of the CVRG Project says “We are delighted to announce this research partnership with BIRN, and know that it will contribute to the efforts of the CVRG to advance our understanding of the causes and treatment of heart disease, the leading cause of mortality in the U.S.”
BIRN is a national initiative to advance biomedical research through data sharing and online collaboration. Funded by the National Center for Research Resources, a unit of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), BIRN provides data-sharing infrastructure, software tools, strategies and advisory services to individual biomedical research users and user groups.
BIRN is a collaborative effort between NCRR and a consortium that includes the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Chicago, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California at Irvine, and University of California at Los Angeles. Participants represent some of the nation’s premier technical and healthcare research universities, hospitals and other institutions, ranging from small research groups to large, well-established research consortia.