Blog

Nine-Week Summer Institute for Undergrads Now Accepting Applications

We are pleased to announce that applications are currently open for our Summer Institute in Biomedical Informatics. This program, now in its 13th year, is open to undergrads majoring in the hard sciences and interested in progressing to post-graduate study (PhD, MD/PhD, or research-oriented MD) in the application of quantitative reasoning to biomedical challenges.... Read more about Nine-Week Summer Institute for Undergrads Now Accepting Applications

Digital Phenotype

John Brownstein described various new modes of data acquisition.

FeverPrint iOS app to understand baseline temperature over large populations: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/feverprints-study-about-body/id1087411988?mt=8

KidsMD Amazon Echo skill http://mobihealthnews.com/content/boston-childrens-hospital-launches-kidsmd-app-amazons-alexa

Discussed unique unsolicited stream of intelligence from various new sources.

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New Big Data Tools

Sync for Science (S4S) Pilot Awarded 

Sync for Science (S4S) graphicOne of two programs based in the HMS Department of Biomedical Informatics announced on February 25 at the White House PMI Summit (along with the Patient-Empowered Precision...

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API discussions

Jeremy Easton-Marks led a discussion of the authentication and session handing for PIC-SURE. This both allows PIC-SURE to use the latest web mechanisms for authentication and allows it to "wrap" legacy authentication systems.

2016: A PIC-SURE Awakening

Chirag and Chirag updated us on the geographically-oriented environmental PIC-SURE API-reachable resources including:

  • Geometry databases, geographic ID table that allows mapping different semantic views of a geographic area. This then includes a FACT table with time-constrained facts.
  • Discussed interaction with GIS-aware database management systems.
  • Updated us on the public PIC-SURE NHANES...
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Big-Data Tools Released at BD2K All-Hands Meeting

The NIH Office of Data Science recently hosted an all-hands grantee meeting for the country's BD2K Centers of Excellence. Among the year-one highlights presented by Zak Kohane, PI for PIC-SURE, was an accessible and user-friendly representation of data collected by the CDC through its National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

NHANES provides health metrics on a large and representative sample of...

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API discussion

Avillach, Murphy, et al., discuss the challenge in going from the dimensional tables of i2b2 (and similar data stores) to the sparse table representation that is expected in most instantiations of the PIC-SURE API.

PIC-SURE API discussion

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Patient Matching

Griffin Weber described his experiments on a 2 million patient database spread across different hospitals to test different patient-joining/matching algorithms. Using dates vs concepts vs number of facts and the various combinations thereof have interestingly different performance characteristics.