An online analysis and information fusion platform for heterogeneous biomedical informatics data

Abstract

Current research in biomedical informatics involves analysis of multiple heterogeneous data sets. This includes patient demographics, clinical and pathology data, treatment history, patient outcomes as well as gene expression, DNA sequences and other information sources such as gene ontologies. Analysis of these data sets could lead to better disease diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and drug discovery. However, the extent of knowledge that can be extracted from individual data sets is limited Recently, there has been a lot of focus on techniques that analyze genomic data sources in an integrated manner through information fusion. This places a need for an online platform to analyze biomedical informatics data sets using these techniques. We present here an online data warehouse to perform data exploration and analysis across heterogeneous biomedical informatics data sets with the aid of information fusion. The prototype platform is available at http://biogeowarehouse.cse.psu.edu.