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. 2023 Jun 20;30(7):1293-1300.
doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocad048.

Building a collaborative cloud platform to accelerate heart, lung, blood, and sleep research

Affiliations

Building a collaborative cloud platform to accelerate heart, lung, blood, and sleep research

Stan Ahalt et al. J Am Med Inform Assoc. .

Abstract

Research increasingly relies on interrogating large-scale data resources. The NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute developed the NHLBI BioData CatalystⓇ (BDC), a community-driven ecosystem where researchers, including bench and clinical scientists, statisticians, and algorithm developers, find, access, share, store, and compute on large-scale datasets. This ecosystem provides secure, cloud-based workspaces, user authentication and authorization, search, tools and workflows, applications, and new innovative features to address community needs, including exploratory data analysis, genomic and imaging tools, tools for reproducibility, and improved interoperability with other NIH data science platforms. BDC offers straightforward access to large-scale datasets and computational resources that support precision medicine for heart, lung, blood, and sleep conditions, leveraging separately developed and managed platforms to maximize flexibility based on researcher needs, expertise, and backgrounds. Through the NHLBI BioData Catalyst Fellows Program, BDC facilitates scientific discoveries and technological advances. BDC also facilitated accelerated research on the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Keywords: cloud computing; data analysis; data-driven science; reproducibility of results; team science.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
BDC is designed for user flexibility, exploring, and collaborating across data collections in a secure cloud workspace, and creating or using existing tools and workflows.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
BDC supports data analysis and access through 4 interoperable platforms, providing researchers the ability to use a wide variety of techniques to store, share, compute on, and analyze their data, while also providing opportunities for collaboration and cohort building. Copyright 2023 by NHLBI BioData Catalyst. Reprinted from our website, with our own permission.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
(A and B) Annotation Explorer and the Imputation Server are powerful, cloud-based tools for genomic analysis.

References

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