iDASH: integrating data for analysis, anonymization, and sharing

Abstract

iDASH (integrating data for analysis, anonymization, and sharing) is the newest National Center for Biomedical Computing funded by the NIH. It focuses on algorithms and tools for sharing data in a privacy-preserving manner. Foundational privacy technology research performed within iDASH is coupled with innovative engineering for collaborative tool development and data-sharing capabilities in a private Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-certified cloud. Driving Biological Projects, which span different biological levels (from molecules to individuals to populations) and focus on various health conditions, help guide research and development within this Center. Furthermore, training and dissemination efforts connect the Center with its stakeholders and educate data owners and data consumers on how to share and use clinical and biological data. Through these various mechanisms, iDASH implements its goal of providing biomedical and behavioral researchers with access to data, software, and a high-performance computing environment, thus enabling them to generate and test new hypotheses.

Figure 1

Integrating data for analysis, anonymization, and sharing. iDASH, the newest National Center for Biomedical Computing, is a scientific team effort that brings together a multi-institutional team of quantitative scientists (information and computer scientists, biostatisticians, mathematicians, and software engineers) to develop algorithms and tools, services, and a biomedical cyber-infrastructure for use by biomedical and behavioral researchers. An illustration of the major components within each area is depicted in this figure. BCI, biomedical cyber-infrastructure.

Figure 2

iDASH natural-language processing (NLP) Ecosystem. Among the multiple resources that iDASH is developing is an NLP Ecosystem to allow collaborative development and testing of algorithms and tools, which structure data from clinical text. This Ecosystem will enable a diverse group of users (eg, researchers, students, and developers) to access public and private datasets, annotations on the data, downloadable tools (eg, algorithms and widgets), and web services. The cyber-infrastructure will provide a computing environment for evaluating code against existing datasets (execution, evaluation, and benchmarking environments), visualizing system output (visualization environment), and performing manual annotations on the textual data (annotation environment). EMR, electronic medical record.

Figure 3

iDASH cyber-infrastructure. iDASH is architecting a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant biomedical cyber-infrastructure to enable data sharing and analysis with high-performance computing (Gordon and Triton HPC). Security is maintained through separation of layers (presentation, application, data, and management zones) and firewalls that secure communication between the zones. The presentation zone, which separates the user from the application, data, and management zones, provides the primary gateway to the overall system and contains the main components of the biomedical cyber-infrastructure framework, such as load balancers and web servers. The application zone provides the business applications and logic to the presentation zone and contains various application servers. The data zone contains all sensitive data repositories, which are accessed by the application zone. Finally, the management zone, which is only accessible to authorized administrators from approved workstations, provides system management and monitoring, security infrastructure, backup tools, and administration tools. BCI, biomedical cyber-infrastructure.