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Notes:
The Human Clinical and Imaging Database has been designed so that
it can be customized and extended to contain relevant information
from any particular sites needs without requiring modification to
the schema itself. This information consists of data concerning the
research subjects used in an experiment, subject assessments and
demographics, the experimental data collected, the experimental
protocols used and any annotations or statistics (metadata)
normally included with an experiment or study. Additionally, the
database architecture uses row level fine-grain database security
allowing for tight control over which individual records and fields
are visible to a particular user.
The user interface architecture is based on three tier Java 2
Enterprise Edition (J2EE) architecture. It consists of a thin
client tier, a servlet/JSP based middle tier and a relational
database based enterprise information source (EIS) tier. The client
tier consists of a web browser. The EIS tier consists of the Human
Clinical and Imaging Database and a collection of stored
procedures/packages for low level data access functions. The middle
tier decouples presentation logic, i.e. code preparing data to be
present to the user, and business logic, the code manipulating
human brain imaging and/or clinical data, which allows flexibility
in presentation layer selection and facilitates parallel
multi-person/multi-site development. Each software layer
communicates with neighbor layers via well defined interfaces,
which remain stable while the actual implementation can change
drastically over time facilitating software maintenance and
robustness.
The complete system is used to manage and query local data at
various research sites within BIRN. In addition to local
operations, the system allows for mediated queries across multiple
federated databases allowing researchers to discover data across
all relevant sites. The current system provides an intuitive and
easy to use clinical and/or derived data complex query builder,
query result export for statistical analysis tools, statistical
analysis of query results through the BIRN Portal, MRI image
preview, conversion and download of the imaging data, as well as
integration with BIRN Portal tools for data management and
manipulation. Additionally, the system is being developed to
provide a complete data management solution where all information
regarding a subject can be maintained. A majority of the source
code is generated from the database schema itself, allowing changes
of the database schema to be reflected in the system easily.
Development of the system continues to be a coordinated and
parallel effort across multiple BIRN sites. The deployed
architecture provides the extensibility, maintainability, security
and parallel development features as demanded by the participating
BIRN sites for building, accessing and maintaining their human
brain imaging and related clinical data.
Changes:
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