VOTES Project

Summary

The Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project has been funded by the Medical Research Council for 3 years. It involves the universities of Glasgow, Oxford, Imperial College, Nottingham, Leicester and Manchester. VOTES will investigate the application of Grid technologies to the clinical trials domain. Specifically, the project will focus upon the areas of:

Patient recruitment
Data collection
Study management aspects of clinical trials

By bringing Grid solutions to these large-scale problems, it is hoped that the clinical domain will benefit from the resulting advances in statistical analysis and compilation.

Latest

Development of a distributed system that takes into account the specific requirements of the UK Biobank project, based in Oxford. Emphasis is being placed on the lightweight nature of any installation on the data resource components, in line with the tenets of developing an information grid.
The VOTES project has been closely involved with the OGSA-DAI team to produce a joining functionality within the OGSA-DAI toolkit. The main benefits of this activity is to allow a mechanism to join remote databases beyond those supported by Microsoft (SQL Server, Access). This will allow a much richer set of data resources to be harnessed for the VOTES project.

Context and Challenges

The clinical trials domain is a particularly challenging one in that potentially overlapping, dynamically varying, geographically distributed, heterogeneous groups of people, resources and data sets need to come together for given trials. In Grid parlance these are termed virtual organisations (VOs). The VOs for clinical trials have very strict security requirements on the data sets, the resources (DBs etc), who is allowed to see, use them, in what context etc.

The main challenges involved in this project will be to federate data from many sources crossing domains that do not necessarily trust each other. The security issues are of great significance due to the inherently sensitive nature of the clinical data involved. Additionally, the issues surrounding data classification will need to be addressed, with implementations of data schemata, meta-data and ontologies to be investigated.

Project Plan

Using Grid applications that are in widespread use today, a portal will be constructed that provides distributed access to several databases modelling the schema and structure in use by health organisations, such as the National Health Service in Scotland. These databases will contain dummy data-sets in the first instance that reflect the format of live data in this domain.

The Grid technologies that will be used include: GridSphere, the Globus Toolkit (v4.0) and OGSA-DAI. These will be coded in Java and will build on top of SQL Server back-end databases. As needs and requirements demand, the choice of technologies may change to most efficiently achieve the goals of the project.

A version of the VOTES portal protected by a Shibboleth mechanism is available here.

Contact

For more information on the VOTES project contact Professor Richard Sinnott (r.sinnott@nesc.gla.ac.uk).