Cancer Translational Research Informatics Platform (caTRIP)

Application Description

caTRIP is a translational research system for the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) project that allows users to post a query across a number of caBIG data services and view the results in a user-friendly interface. Its initial focus is outcomes analysis, which allows clinicians to query across data from existing patients with similar characteristics to identify patients that were treated successfully. In doing so, caTRIP can

• Help inform treatment and improve patient care
• Enable the searching of available tumor tissue
• Locate patients for clinical trials
• Investigate the association between multiple predictors and their corresponding outcomes such as survival

Of importance, caTRIP relies on the vast array of existing caBIG applications, including the Tumor Registry, Cancer Text Information Extraction System (caTIES), caTissue , Cancer Annotation Engine, and caIntegrator.

caTRIP is driven completely by the metadata exposed by the domain data grid services. Queries spanning multiple systems are designed using common data elements (CDEs) displayed in dropdown menus. CDEs were also used to establish links between different services.

Project Description

Client: NCI

SemanticBits, in collaboration with Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, developed the caTRIP. Some of the key features of development include:

• Leveraged metadata for checking the semantic equivalence of classes and attributes at runtime
• Storing domain-model metadata of a data service in a XML file, which is generated using the caDSR grid service
• Using the above XML metadata file to retrieve information about various CDEs that are exposed by a service
• Partnership with the caGrid development team to design the metadata extract schema.