Friday, June 5, 2009

Revving the German i2b2 Engine

We recently received news from our informatics colleagues in the German medical research organization (TMF) regarding impressive strides they have made in adopting and adapting the i2b2 codebase. Much of this work has been done under the supervision of Hans-Ulrich Prokosch with his amazingly productive colleague Sebastian Mate. I paraphrase here a recent missive:

First, Sebastian simplified the installation process such that, based on his installation script, they can now set up a new i2b2-installation in less than half an hour. Further, he has already built up a comprehensive Erlangen specific ontologies (urology cancer data items: ICD-10-GM, ICD-O, ICPM, TNM-Codes, Grading, Study Codes, Patient Scores, patient age groups, gender etc).

They have also imported more than 800.000 patient records from their hospital data warehouse, mainly with demographic data, and ICD-codes, procedure codes, gender and age and a second smaller subset with patients from their newly established urology cancer documentation application which is part of their hospital information system.

In their evaluation project for TMF, Sebastian has analyzed the TMF pseudonymisation module and established it as a first preprocessing step before loading data records into the i2b2 hive. All their data within i2b2 are now fully pseudonymized.


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