IAPA: Infrastructure to Access, Process and Analyse biomedical data

Nowadays many health care systems are facing new challenges and large-scale changes. Everybody working within national health care is confronted with a political discussion about how to provide efficient health care without the increase of the costs for the healthcare. Many different standpoints emerged but on some basic principle everyone was agreeing:

• the state should provide healthcare at high standard for everyone.

• the cost should not grow ad infinitum.

• the education of the medical staff should be bases on the latest cognitions.

The value of studies, registry data or the analysis of comprehensive clinical databases to generate new medical knowledge is generally accepted. Undoubtedly it is necessary to describe patient characteristics, to monitor trends, to discover patterns and to evaluate these results.

Based on a valid dataset the cancer register can measure the frequency of cancer incidence, differentiated within form of cancer, gender, age and other characteristics. Coherences between early diagnoses, therapies, chance for cure can lead to new methods of research. It will help to reduce the term between identification of a cancer incidence and the beginning of the research for a new therapy or correct treatment.

Researchers and medical scientist will have the possibility to compare data of patients suffering from cancer. It will help them to find coherences between the emergence of cancer and risk factors. We believe that time (medical, technological) has come to fully exploit the data available on cancer within an integrated view, in order to find opportunistic links (without a priori knowledge) between different modalities of the data.

In short, the IAPA project aims at designing an effective and efficient integrated infrastructure to access, to share and more importantly to cross-analyse patient biomedical data related to the fight against cancer.

The IAPA project gathers together leading and complementary actors. The Claudius Regaud Institute is the medical partner, with a long tradition and expertise in the fight against cancer. The IRIT laboratory gathers the computer scientists needed to accomplish the project, experts in data storage, access and management, imagery, knowledge discovery, computing infrastructure, learning platforms.

Discussion with IBM and CS-SI are on the move to offer a proper integrated tool to the medical community.

If you have any questions about the project don’t hesitate to contact Jean-Marc Pierson (pierson@irit.fr) or Cédric Beucher (beucher@irit.fr).

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