Integrating Biobank Data into a Clinical Data Research Network: The IBCB Project.

Unlabelled: Development of biobanks is still hampered by difficulty to collect high quality sample annotations using patient clinical information. The IBCB project evaluated the feasibility of a nationwide clinical data research network for this purpose.

Method: the infrastructure, based on eHOP and I2B2 technologies, was interfaced with the legacy IT components of 3 hospitals. The evaluation focused on the data management process and tested 5 expert queries in Hepatocarcinoma.

Results: the integration of biobank data was comprehensive and easy. Five out of 5 queries were successfully performed and shown consistent results with the data sources excepted one query which required to search in unstructured data. The platform was designed to be scalable and showed that with few effort biobank data and clinical data can be integrated and leveraged between hospitals. Clinical or phenotyping concepts extraction techniques from free text could significantly improve the samples annotation with fine granularity information.