Research

Shared Resources

Biomedical Informatics

The Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource builds upon a longstanding collaboration with the Yale Center for Medical Informatics (YCMI), the YCC Clinical Research Service (CRS), and the Yale Department of Pathology Informatics Group. Inaugurated in 1996, the BioMedical Informatics Shared Resource's initial goal was to develop a multi-disciplinary database to collect, store, curate, and help analyze data for clinical trials and clinical research studies, a system now called Trial/DB. Over the past decade, the activities of the Shared Resource have significantly broadened.

Major activities of the Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource include:

• Using Trial/DB, now fully operational, for all YCC investigator initiated trials; continuing to augment and refine Trial/DB to meet the needs of YCC researchers.
• Development of the TrialTracker system built to track administrative information regarding all YCC trials.
• Development of a Cancer Data Repository (CaDR) building on the Yale Tumor Registry system; this development is an intermediate step toward creating a much broader institutional clinical data repository at Yale, using cancer as a pilot domain.
• Maintaining and refining two databases and related tools to support the cancer-related tissue array research (Cruella) and DNA microarray research (GeneCube).
• Participating in a variety of activities related to the national caBIG initiative.
• Integrating Trial/DB, and ultimately the CaDR, with other information systems used by the YCC; and coordinating YCC's activities with data-intensive genomic/proteomic informatics and clinical imaging infrastructure being developed at Yale.

Contact
Cynthia Brandt, MD, MPH, Director
(203) 737-5762
cynthia.brandt@yale.edu