Reviewing the Roadmap

Shawn Murphy led a discussion of the roadmap over the next year of i2b2.

2b2 Roadmap for 2009-2010

Release 1.4 = “Enterprise Ready i2b2”
Release Candidate targeted for September 2009

This release allows the entire set of patients from the enterprise to be exposed to the research community of the hospital while preserving patient privacy, providing the way for basic queries to funnel down to a set of patients interesting to the investigator. The chosen set of patients is matched to controls from the enterprise database and a project-specific mini-database is created. Major software enhancements of release 1.4 compared to release 1.3 include a hardening of the project management cell with a new, full featured client for managing enterprise users, a plug-in architecture for the data repository cell that allows complex server-side workflows, and streamlined project mini-database creation with processes to build sets of matched control patients for a given set of patients of interest.

Release 1.5 = “NLP Workflow Enabled i2b2”
Release candidate targeted for February 2010

This release allows the text notes that are contained in a project-specific mini-database, such as clinic notes of a patient or radiology reports, to be processed in a high throughput manner with natural language processing (NLP). Any NLP tool can fit into this workflow, because the i2b2 workbench serves as a means to flow notes to the workstation of the NLP expert, and once the expert has transformed the text into coded data, re-import the coded data back into the i2b2 hive. The i2b2 workbench will also provide a tool for basic natural language processing to be performed using a Support Vector Machine for people who have no experience with NLP. Major software enhancements of release 1.5 compared to release 1.4 include a hardening of the data import process, a coupling of ontology management with data import processing, and a tool for non-expert NLP users.

Release 2.0 = “Open repository i2b2”
Release targeted for July 2010

This version represents the beginning of an open repository management of i2b2 software. An open Concurrent Versions System (CVS) will allow the i2b2 community to submit changes to the software that will be considered for all new releases.