CardioVascular Research Grid (CVRG)
A Distributed Community Resource for Multi-Scale Cardiovascular Data Integration Discovery
Research on the systems biology of cardiovascular disease offers great potential to improve our understanding of the disease mechanism at multiple scales of biological organization, from genes to cells to tissues to the whole organ. It also can enhance our ability to discover new biological markers that can be used to diagnose disease risk for individuals, assess disease state, and identify risk groups. Efforts of cardiovascular researchers are, however, limited by the lack of infrastructure to support collaborative efforts, integrate multi-scale data obtained from cardiovascular research and clinical studies, and share analysis tools. This project will create an innovative resource, the CardioVascular Research Grid (CVRG), to facilitate and promote research efforts that span multiple research groups and institutions. The CVRG will provide the cardiovascular research community an open-source, extensible software infrastructure enabling discovery, federation, and sharing of cardiovascular data and tools. It will also provide community access to novel tools for the discovery of biomarkers.
The CVRG is an inter-disciplinary, collaborative effort, bringing together biomedical and software systems researchers at Johns Hopkins University, the Ohio State University, and University of California at San Diego. The Biomedical Informatics Department (BMI) of OSU is leading the effort to build the core Grid middleware infrastructure to support CVRG functions (CVRG core infrastructure). The CVRG core infrastructure will provide support for three inter-related functions: (1) integration of information from multi-scale biomedical data; (2) large-scale image data management and analysis; (3) easy and secure access to CVRG data and analytic resources. The design and implementation of this core middleware infrastructure will leverage software systems developed by BMI, the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIGTM) caGrid infrastructure, and software infrastructure from the Biomedical Informatics Research Grid (BIRN). The CVRG core functions will be implemented through a suite of components:
- BioINTEGRATE to support management of metadata and data types. It will implement support for interoperability among data and analytical resources and integration of information from multiple sources. It will consist of services to address vocabulary, metadata, and data management needs in cardiovascular SNP, transcriptional, proteomic, electrophysiological and de-identified patient/study data.
- BioMANAGE to enable management of large, multi-scale/resolution, multi-dimensional datasets in a distributed environment. BioMANAGE will be used to create a federated repository of primary multimodal imaging data including tagged MR, high-energy phosphate content, ATP production, myocardial regional sodium distribution and Gd-enhanced MRI and CT imaging data on heart structure and motion in health and disease.
- BioPORTAL to provide a way for biologists to use data and analytic services deployed on the CVRG. BioPORTAL will facilitate secure access to services through a web portal.
Grid software middleware infrastructure, based on the caBIGTM caGrid infrastructure, that will provide the runtime support for development and deployment of BioINTEGRATE, BioMANAGE, BioPORTAL, and CVRG applications. This middleware infrastructure will implement support for common functions such as secure communication, remote service invocation, authentication and authorization, and service discovery.
Project Researchers
Tahsin Kurc, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator)
Tony Pan, M.S. (Principal Investigator)
Justin Permar (Principal Investigator)
Joel Saltz, M.D., Ph.D. (Principal Investigator)
Stephen Langella, M.S. (Principal Investigator)