Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) Overview VOTES is a pioneering project investigating the application of Grid technology to the field of clinical trials and epidemiological studies. It addresses the issues surrounding life-science studies on a macro scale: In terms of e-Science, the emphasis of the project is to create a security oriented data Grid that links disparate data sources from across multiple domains, in a bid to gain greater scientific and medical insight using the clinical data available. Clinical data can be harnessed more effectively using Grid technologies. Three areas of clinical trials have been identified as particularly pertinent to the goals of the VOTES project: Patient Recruitment – achieving a higher rate of successful recruitment of eligible subjects, with more efficient targeting over a wider population. Data Collection – over the course of a trial, e.g. the drugs/placebos that patients are taking and measuring their effects Study Management – processes involved in recruitment to ensure for example that the right people see the right data in the right context The central point of establishing collaborative federation of trial data is by creating a Clinical Virtual Organisation (CVO) of participating institutions: Architecture Portal Server – provides an intuitive and easy-to-use point of access for the CVO. Grid Server – provides the grid service interfaces that perform the functions of the infrastructure (authorization, query submission and database allocation) Data Server – provides a connecting node to the database pool, through which the query is passed. Also connects to databases on other nodes of the CVO. Driving Database – heads the cluster of auxiliary databases on a node. The schematic diagram below shows how a single node on the CVO looks. The box marked “Oxford” shows how this would connect to a separate node: Technologies Globus Toolkit v4.0 – developed by the Globus team at ANL, this is used to construct the grid server functionality. GridSphere v2.1 – an open-source and collaborative development (Jason Novotny, Michael Russell, Oliver Wehrens) is used to implement the Grid portal. OGSA-DAI v2.2 – developed by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, this provides the data service for communicating to database pools. Security Resource-level: Individual DBMS administers local accounts for local resources VO-level: Access Control Matrix, administered from VOTES portal, maps local schema onto VO-wide schema, then applies authorisation controls on each field parameter. Summary VOTES aims to provide clinical data federation across multiple domains through the construction of a Grid infrastructure Future goals of the project include VO-administration portals, recruitment portals, visual medical record data sources, integration of records across national border domains and access through Shibboleth technologies. Contact / Further Information Website and portal: Prof. Richard Sinnott – Anthony Stell – Oluwafemi Ajayi – Data Sources SCI Store (Scottish Care Information) – a batch storage system that allows hospitals to add a variety of information to be shared across the community. GPASS (General Practice Administration System for Scotland) – the core IT application used by over 85% of clinicians and general practitioners involved in primary care across Scotland. SMR (Scottish Morbidity Records) – a set of data records relating to all patients discharged from non-psychiatric and non-obstetric wards in Scottish hospitals. Clinical Virtual Organisations Framework Distributed Data Framework Clinical data can be federated across multiple domains using the Grid infrastructure described above. Access to specific parameters is restricted based on allocated roles within the VO framework From this, SQL relating to this particular query selection is constructed and executed through the data service. The screenshots below show the parameter selection screen on the VOTES portal, with a privileged user on the left and a user with restricted privileges on the right: