Developing a Web-enabled and graphics-enhanced collaborative environment for integrated research of cardiovascular and atherosclerotic clinical biology

Abstract

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is one of the leading killers worldwide. Lipoprotein and apolipoprotein play an important role in developing CHDs. To tackle the challenging task of CHD lipoprotein and atherosclerotic research, collaborative work is crucial. With an interdiscipline in nature, such research involves bio-chemistry, cardiovascular biology, lipoprotein structure, fluorescent imaging, 3D modelling, data mining, etc. This project aims to create a Web based and integrated solution to support a multi-disciplinary knowledge discovery process for the study of cardiovascular and atherosclerotic biology. The emphasis of the project is to address (1) the sharing of cardiovascular clinical data; and (2) the system integration for CHD cardiovascular research. The system currently under development is mainly implemented on a PC Window platform with an intranet-centric design. An Apache HTTP server, a MySQL SQL server, Perl, and R Language, are employed for the system development independent to hardware platforms. The system offers easy information management and data sharing by multiple parties across Internet. Major datasets include lipoprotein phenotype/genotype and laser confocal images. A user-friendly interface is designed allowing users to deposit, retrieve, visualize and analyze the CHD information from different sites.