Medical-Blocks-A Platform for Exploration, Management, Analysis, and Sharing of Data in Biomedical Research: System Development and Integration Results

Waldo Valenzuela; Fabian Balsiger; Roland Wiest; Olivier Scheidegger

doi:10.2196/32287

Medical-Blocks-A Platform for Exploration, Management, Analysis, and Sharing of Data in Biomedical Research: System Development and Integration Results

JMIR Form Res. 2022 Apr 11;6(4):e32287. doi: 10.2196/32287.

Authors

Waldo Valenzuela¹, Fabian Balsiger², Roland Wiest², Olivier Scheidegger^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
² Support Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
³ Department of Neurology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.

PMID: 35232718
PMCID: PMC9039815
DOI: 10.2196/32287

Abstract

Background: Biomedical research requires health care institutions to provide sensitive clinical data to leverage data science and artificial intelligence technologies. However, providing researchers access to health care data in a simple and secure manner proves to be challenging for health care institutions.

Objective: This study aims to introduce and describe Medical-Blocks, a platform for exploration, management, analysis, and sharing of data in biomedical research.

Methods: The specification requirements for Medical-Blocks included connection to data sources of health care institutions with an interface for data exploration, management of data in an internal file storage system, data analysis through visualization and classification of data, and data sharing via a file hosting service for collaboration. Medical-Blocks should be simple to use via a web-based user interface and extensible with new functionalities by a modular design via microservices (blocks). The scalability of the platform should be ensured through containerization. Security and legal regulations were considered during development.

Results: Medical-Blocks is a web application that runs in the cloud or as a local instance at a health care institution. Local instances of Medical-Blocks access data sources such as electronic health records and picture archiving and communication system at health care institutions. Researchers and clinicians can explore, manage, and analyze the available data through Medical-Blocks. Data analysis involves the classification of data for metadata extraction and the formation of cohorts. In collaborations, metadata (eg, the number of patients per cohort) or the data alone can be shared through Medical-Blocks locally or via a cloud instance with other researchers and clinicians.

Conclusions: Medical-Blocks facilitates biomedical research by providing a centralized platform to interact with medical data in collaborative research projects. Access to and management of medical data are simplified. Data can be swiftly analyzed to form cohorts for research and be shared among researchers. The modularity of Medical-Blocks makes the platform feasible for biomedical research where heterogeneous medical data are required.

Keywords: DICOM; PACS; biomedical research; data handling; data science; data sharing; medical informatics; platform; software; translational medical research.

©Waldo Valenzuela, Fabian Balsiger, Roland Wiest, Olivier Scheidegger. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (https://formative.jmir.org), 11.04.2022.