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Exploring the Portability of Informatics Capabilities from a Clinical Application to a Bioscience Application

Affiliations of the authors: Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT (MAS, RS, CAB, PLM); Department of Genetics, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT (T-RL, KW) USA

Correspondence and reprints: Mark A. Shifman, MD, PhD, Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, PO Box 208009, New Haven, CT 06520-8009; e-mail: <mark.shifman{at}yale.edu>.

Received for publication: 09/15/03; accepted for publication: 02/28/04.

This report describes XDesc (eXperiment Description), a pilot project that serves as a case study exploring the degree to which an informatics capability developed in a clinical application can be ported for use in the biosciences. In particular, XDesc uses the Entity-Attribute-Value database implementation (including a great deal of metadata-based functionality) developed in TrialDB, a clinical research database, for use in describing the samples used in microarray experiments stored in the Yale Microarray Database (YMD). XDesc was linked successfully to both TrialDB and YMD, and was used to describe the data in three different microarray research projects involving Drosophila. In the process, a number of new desirable capabilities were identified in the bioscience domain. These were implemented on a pilot basis in XDesc, and subsequently "folded back" into TrialDB itself, enhancing its capabilities for dealing with clinical data. This case study provides a concrete example of how informatics research and development in clinical and bioscience domains has the potential for synergy and for cross-fertilization.