Data on more than 22,000 cancer cases are now available for research by bona fide clinical and medical researchers. This repository is the first major output of the Clinical e-Science Framework (CLEF), an e-Science project funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC). Sophisticated security systems, also developed by CLEF, ensure secure and ethical access to the databank. Dr Catalina Hallett will demonstrate the query of the new database at the e-Science All Hands meeting in Nottingham on 20 September.

Patient records contain a wealth of information that could be very useful to medical research. To make this information accessible to researchers, however, it must be extracted from what is often written text and presented in such a way that it can be compared with data from scientific and other databases. CLEF has developed techniques to capture relevant information from text automatically and enter it into a database. The project has also implemented stringent access control, authentication and secure transmission protocols using sophisticated encryption standards to protect against accidental disclosures.

Professor Alan Rector, CLEF's director, said: "The CLEF repository is optimised to treat electronic healthcare records as an interactive knowledge source for academic researchers and clinicians to help them access the latest medical information. Once fully deployed, it will lead to previously unthinkable, rapid advances in healthcare research by enabling researchers to analyse data stored in a wide range of geographically-spread databases, on-line."

Professor David Ingram's team at University College, London built the repository using a new method for importing and structuring data so that users can do population queries over longitudinal data sets. The CLEF repository supports the large-scale analysis of patient records in a Grid environment. It can handle complex queries, whilst retaining the critical semantic, structural and medic
'"/>

Contact: Judy Redfearn
judy.redfearn@epsrc.ac.uk
44-7-768-356-309
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
21-Sep-2005

Page: 1 2
Related medicine news :

1. Wiley acquires HEED, the worlds leading Health Economic Evaluations Database
2. Conventional prognostic factors fail to explain better prostate cancer survival in most Asian men
3. Survival differences by race most apparent in advanced stages of breast cancer
4. Stomach cancer rate set to fall further 25 percent over next decade
5. MRI finds breast cancer before it becomes dangerous
6. Investigators uncover intriguing clues to why persistent acid reflux sometimes turns into cancer
7. New cause of tamoxifen resistance in breast cancer cells discovered at Lombardi
8. Pathway links inflammation, angiogenesis and breast cancer
9. Using MRI for diagnosis could help prevent breast cancer progression
10. Electric fields have potential as a cancer treatment
11. Shining light on pancreatic cancer