2004 Breakout Sessions

A2 Breakout Session
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CaBIG Tissue Banks and Pathology Workspace
Ashokkumar Patel, MD and Michael Feldman, MD, PhD

This presentation will describe the Tissue Banking and Pathology Tools workspace within the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) project. The NCI funded initiative “caBIG” is designed to create an integrated Bioinformatics grid among 49 NCI designated cancer centers. This integrated grid will provide the architecture, language and systems integration to allow centers to share data, resources and applications (http://cabig.nci.nih.gov/caBIG/). The project is designed around “Workspaces”, one of which is Tissue Banks and Pathology Tools. The other Workspaces include Clinical Trials Management, Integrative Cancer Research, Vocabularies and Common Data Elements and finally Architecture. Within each workspace are developer and adopter sites. In the Tissue Bank and Pathology Tools workspace, there are two developer sites (University of Pittsburgh and Washington University) and nine adopter sites (Penn, Alabama, Arizona, Dartmouth, Fox Chase, Jefferson, Hopkins and Northwestern). This presentation will discuss and describe the goals and deliverables of the Tissue Banking and Pathology Tools Workspace efforts to develop a common database for tissue banking, as well as a set of mapping tools for centers with pre-existing tissue bank software. In addition, the manner in which a set of common data elements within the pathology workspace will facilitate information sharing between centers with tissue banks as well as between centers sharing paraffin archives will also be described. We will present and discuss integration of tools for UMLS encoding and de-identification within pre-existing AP-LIS systems from the SPIN group into this caBIG workspace. Finally, we will discuss how these efforts extend other projects seeking to integrate pathology resources between centers. One such partnership involves the Pennslyvania Cancer Alliance Bioinformatics Consortium (www.pcabc.upmc.edu) and two NCI organ specific tissue resources: the Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource (www.prostatetissues.org) and the Cooperative Breast Cancer Tissue Resource (www.cbctr.ims.nci.gov).