Crimson Cell

Wilson, Bry, Murphy, Kohane, Churchill

Discussed progress on the Cell. Includes support for approved protocols and specimen details.

Rheumatoid Arthritis

Beth Karlson provided an overall review of RA epidemiology so as to compare to our i2b2 work. Among the interesting facts I learned: In the Nurse's Health Study only 6% of the self-reported cases of RA were validated by the expert reviewers. Described relative risk of smoking with regard to RA is approximately 1.4 and is an effect that take appears to only taper off with about 20 years of smoking cessation.

Planning for hands on i2b2 tutorial for AMIA NOW

Mendis, Wilson, Savova, Weber, Kohane, Churchill,

Discussed the content for a hands on tutorial for the upcoming AMIA NOW.

New members of the i2b2 team

Brian Wilson (bioinformatics and statistical genetics) and Guergana Savova (natural language processing) both from the Mayo Institute have just joined the i2b2 team. Welcome to both!

AMIA Translational Summit

Shawn, Zak, Susanne, Vivian, Mike, and Griffin attended the AMIA Translational Informatics Summit 2010 in SF. There were several i2b2 events including a) a packed three and half hour tutorial b) an overview of i2b2 applications c) an evening AUG meeting. Lots of interest, good questions and interesting developments.

Major Depressive Disorder

Perlis, Iosifescu et al,,

Discussed the artifact that definitionally happens in clinical trials of assigning individuals to responder and non-responder categories when in fact the data always shows that the vast majority of individuals are oscillating in the spectrum in between. So unlike 8 week trial studies of antidepressants where there has to be an assignment of response vs no-response, these dense clinical data call for the application of other metrics such as proportion of days feeling "well." Unfortunately, such quality-of-life metrics don't go particularly well with many reviewers.

Rheumatology/Rheumatoid Arthritis

Plenge, Karlson, Liao et al.,

Planning for Kat's maternity leave.

• Improving smoking history.
  • Discussed the challenge of inaccurate notes by "cut and paste" documenters.
• Improving family history.
• Starting gene-environment analysis

Large pharmaceutical companies interested in collaboration.