Current Projects
LEUKO-Expert (10/2020 – 09/2023, ca. 2.4 Mio €)
Rare diseases (RD) occur with a prevalence of less than 1:2,000 persons (EU definition). More than 8,000 RD are known, often genetically determined. Due to their rare occurrence, the RD are often not diagnosed at all, incorrectly or with a long delay diagnosed. Medical experts are mainly involved in selected Centers for Rare Diseases available.
The goal of the LEUKO-Expert project is to establish an expert system for the diagnostic support of RD Leukodystrophy and to evaluate it within the scope of a proof-of-concept. The expert system will use a model created with modern data science methods, such as from the machine learning domain. The model will be generated by using clinical, image data (magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]) and genetic data. Such data are available at Centre for Rare Diseases in Aachen, Leipzig, and Tübingen.
LEUKO-Expert is a research project funded by the German Ministry of Health.
NFDI4Health (10/2020 – 09/2025, ca. 270.000 €)
There is a large number of clinical trials, epidemiological studies and other medical research projects each year which collect data about probands and patients, their diagnoses and therapies, and their environment according to a relevant research question. While the outcome of these research projects is often published, there is, however, no common way to publish metadata and data. Sometimes, metadata and data are not managed by a common format, such as Object Data Model or other available standards. Therefore, such data are often not findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These FAIR criteria are immanent important making the research outcome transparent and reusable which is beneficial for medical research.
The goal of NFDI4Health is overcome these burdens by designing and implementing a concept for a federated research data infrastructure for personal health data. This work includes a common data structure for all this data, the federated data infrastructure itself, data protected / data privacy, and distributed analysis infrastructures allowing to include and compute the distributed data. We will show the functionality of all these aspects using a series of use cases.
NFDI4Health COVID19 (06/2020 – 05/2023, 30,000 €)
Similar to the NFDI4Health project, the NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19 focuses on the FAIRification of data that have been captured in hospitals, epidemiological and public health science projects about the pandemic outbreak COVID-19. In particular, the task force focuses beyond clinical patient data on the consequences of the pandemic outbreak for public health, such as Morbidity, mortality, access to health care, quality of life and effects of social isolation.
Therefore, the task force project focuses on three main aspects:
- Improve the FAIRness of COVID-19 research data collections
- Promote the timely implementation of harmonized research related to COVID-19
- Record linkage of various COVID-19 data records
The Database Group at the University of Applied Sciences Mittweida works on record linkage related topics together with partners from the University Medical Center Göttingen, University Medical Center Greifswald, University Leipzig, and the BIPS department at the University Bremen.
Leipzig Health Atlas (03/2016 – 02/2021, ca. 2.4 Mio €)
Leipzig Health Atlas (LHA) is a BMBF funded project to develop and deploy an ontology based online platform to manage publications together with publication data as well as well comprehensive models and method implementations. We collect study and publication data which can be retrieved on request as a first step in reproducible research. For many models, we provide implementations which can be used by clinicians, statisticians, other scientists or simply people with interest in it.
LIFE-LIFT (01/2018 – 12/2020, 3 Mio €)
LIFE-LIFT is a project funded by the Saxonian Ministry of Education and Research to safe and extend the infrastructure at the LIFE Research Institute for Civilization Diseases, Leipzig University. This infrastructure consists of technical and organizational parts. While physical IT, biobank, and laboratory infrastructures belong mainly to the technical part, the central LIFE data management is the organizational part. All together, LIFE follows the Open Archive Information System (OAIS) reference model for sharing centrally managed data.
SMITH within the Medical Informatics Initiative (01/2018 – 12/2021)
We are part of the Smart Medical Information Technology for Healthcare (SMITH) consortia. The goal of SMITH is to build a IT infrastructure managing data in hospitals in a standardized manner in a way they can be shared and (re)used in overwhelming scientific projects. Many partners from academia and industry cooperate in SMITH, such as Universities in Leipzig, Jena, and Aachen (RWTH) and corresponding University Hospitals.
Previous Projects
PAREMIS (09/2017 – 05/2018, ca. 50,000 €)
PAREMIS was a BMBF funded project in which we designed a concept for model-based registries for clinical research. In particular, we developed a concept for rare diseases including Prader-Willi and Angelman Syndrome and others. PAREMIS was a cooperation between the Leipzig University (IMISE, LIFE), the University Hospital Leipzig (UZSE, IT-Management) and the Institute for Digital Information Technologies (IfDT).