caTISSUE Core Adoption at the University of Pittsburgh Lessons Learned from implementation of a standard-driven system to expedite translational research.
Anil V. Parwani MD; Assistant Professor; Michelle Bisceglia BS; Tissue Bank Manager; Rajiv Dhir MD; Associate Professor; Lindsay Mock CTR; Tissue Bank Supervisor; Linda Schmandt MS; Project Manager; Andrew K. Pople BSN; System Architect; Amita T. Mistry MD; Postdoctoral Fellow; Waqas Amin MD; Research Associate; Sambit Kumar Mohanty MD; Postdoctoral Fellow; John T. Milnes BS; Database Administrator;
Content:
Sambit K. Mohanty MD DNB, Waqas Amin MD, Amita T. Mistry MD, John T. Milnes BS, Betty Kotowski, Debby Bass BS, Gail Harger MS, Hai Hu PhD, Tim D. Fennell MS, Nancy B. Whelan BS, Anil V. Parwani MD PhD, Michael Liebman PhD, Rajiv Dhir MD, Roberta B. Ness MD MPH, Robert Robert P. Edwards MD PhD, Maxwell, George MD, PhD L LTC WRAMC-Wash DC, Michael J. Bechic MD PhD, Department of Biomedical Informatics Department of Pathology Department of Obstetrics and gynecology Department of Epidemiology
Technology:
The objectives of this project are 1) to test early versions of the software in a working tissue bank, providing feedback from tissue bankers to refine and validate its usability and robustness and 2) to implement the software into the daily workflow of the Health Sciences Tissue Bank at the University of Pittsburgh retiring the home-grown Tissue Bank Inventory System (TBINV).
Design:
The University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Tissue Bank (HSTB) is the centralized, multi-disciplinary biorepository for the entire UPMC Health System supporting internal researchers as well as external collaborators nationwide. The current inventory includes over 40,000 specimens of various solid organ neoplasms. Although the HSTB continues to grow and provide conscientious service to the researchers who use its resources, the current inventory software is not ideally designed to accommodate our routine workflow and offers very minimal query capabilities. The tissue bankers have to rely on other databases to find the cases researchers request, a cumbersome and time-consuming process. caTISSUE Core adoption plan was planned provide a central biorepository at all three sites to track, receipt and distribution of biospecimens and to support the flexible, sophisticated querying and reporting that are essential in relation to biospecimen. The adoption team comprised of Senior Tissue Bakers and Pathologists, and Bioinformaticians.
Results:
When fully operational, caTISSUE Core will provide a central repository for the tissue bankers for tracking and distribution of biospecimens and for robust querying and reporting of biospecimens and associated data to fulfill the requirements of translational researchers. By combining the flexible query interface of caTISSUE Core with the ability to export the result of queries, the tissue bankers will be able to prepare virtually any custom report they require, from summaries of bank-wide operations during a specified period to daily work lists for a particular banker. Additionally, it will eventually provide access to the data that tissue bankers most often need.
Conclusion:
The caTISSUE Core suite when completely operational in HSTB will provide a central biorepository to access information on multimodal data sets and the ability for tracking and integration with other limbs of the TBPT. Replacing TBINV with caTISSUE Core will provide the HSTB with a robust, queryable, and maintainable system that can be integrated with other tissue banking and pathology tools.
