2024-01-08 NHLBI BioData Catalyst Ecosystem Release Notes
Introduction
The 2024-01-08 release marks the 16th release for the NHLBI BioData Catalyst® (BDC) ecosystem. This release includes several new features (e.g., enabling Azure and searching data without logging in) along with documentation and tutorials (e.g., data dictionary field documentation) to help new users get started on the system. Please find more detail on the new features and user support materials in the sections below.
The 2024-01-08 data releases include the addition of research on multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children linked to COVID-19, bone marrow transplant and pulmonary hypertension in sickle cell disease, atherosclerosis, and psoriasis. Please refer to the Data Releases section below for more information as well as the Data page on the BDC website.
Significant new features
Azure available on BDC Powered by Seven Bridges (BDC-SB): Velsera expanded their existing multi-cloud offerings by enabling Microsoft Azure (southcentralus) on BDC-SB. Users can select that computing and storage environment when creating a project. This allows users to avoid any egress charges when computing on data stored in Azure. This is of particular interest to users who want to connect their own Azure cloud buckets to BDC-SB.
SAS upgrade in BDC-SB: SAS on BDC-SB has been upgraded from SAS Viya 3.5 to SAS Studio 9.4. SAS 9.4 has improved functionality over SAS 3.5 including more complete data management solutions and additional programming languages.
Open PIC-SURE without login: Open PIC-SURE is now publicly available on BDC Powered by PIC-SURE (BDC-PIC-SURE), meaning no eRA Commons credentials are required to access the site. Researchers can access this site to search terms of interest, apply filters at the variable-value level, retrieve obfuscated, aggregate counts, and view single variable distributions of their selected cohort. This new functionality allows researchers to discover and interact with data available on BDC without needing to log in, decreasing the barrier to data exploration. Check out Open PIC-SURE here.
Data Hierarchies in BDC-PIC-SURE: Researchers are now able to view the data hierarchy associated with variables in BDC-PIC-SURE by clicking the “Data Tree” icon in the “Actions” column of the search results. This enables researchers to understand better how variables are related and obtain additional context for these variables. Note that this feature is currently in beta and will only be available for some studies. Feedback and input on this feature is welcome!
New user support materials and documentation
BDC-PIC-SURE Data Dictionary fields documentation: Documentation outlining the data dictionary fields returned from the PIC-SURE API was created. This provides a detailed account of what each field represents, including relationships between fields. This documentation can be found in the BDC-PIC-SURE GitBook here.
Data Releases
The table below highlights which studies were included in the 2024-01-08 data release. The release features research on long-term outcomes of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children linked to COVID-19 (COVID19-MUSIC_GRU), bone marrow transplant for severe sickle cell disease (BioLINCC-BMT_CTN_HMB), and ApoA-1, atherosclerosis, and psoriasis (DIR-ApoA-1_Atherosclerosis_in_Psoriasis_GRU). Additionally, updated metadata is provided for the ongoing study on sildenafil therapy in treating pulmonary hypertension in sickle cell disease (walk-PHaSST). This data includes clinical files and is now available for access. The data is now available for access across the entire ecosystem.
Planned Upcoming Data Releases
For detailed platform release notes please consult the following resources:
BDC-Gen3 release notes BDC-Terra release notes BDC-Seven Bridges release notes BDC-PIC-SURE release notes
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