ARCHIVED: Completed project: Advanced IT Core (AITC)

Primary UITS contact: William K. Barnett, Senior Manager for Science Community Tools (Email William Barnett)

Completed: May 11, 2010

Description: The UITS Advanced Information Technology Core (AITC; established as the INGEN Advanced IT Core in 2001) is an IU School of Medicine (IUSM) service core based in the Research Technologies (RT) division of UITS. The goal of this core is to act as a gateway for the IUSM to the broad array of RT resources and services such as supercomputing, data management, visualization, bioinformatics, statistical analysis, grid computing, and other advanced technologies available from UITS. A secondary goal is to partner closely with health care and related sciences researchers to develop innovative technology services that can advance research programs and collaborations.

The UITS AITC both complements and supplements IUSM's Information Services and Technology Management (ISTM) office (which is responsible for desktop computing environments, networking, IUSM operational and administrative computing applications, and IUSM IT security), the IUSM Biostatistics Core (which assists researchers with statistical techniques in biostatistics and bioinformatics, data management, and data integration), and the IUSM Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Core (which provides bioinformatics tools, data management, website design, and data hosting).

Outcome and benefits: The intended outcome of the AITC is to improve the practice and outcomes of medical research in Indiana through the use of advanced technologies.

New projects: The UITS AITC and RT are now involved in a number of new projects with the IU health care community:

• Distributed Drug Discovery by William Scott. The AITC is developing a portal to create a collaborative environment for education and research for high school teachers & students, computational chemists, analytical chemists, pharma, and funding agencies. The group currently helps teachers and students in poor countries in Africa to participate in cutting-edge research by creating novel potential drug target molecules using extremely inexpensive equipment designed by the group. The Core is helping formulate the overall information architecture to position the group to expand the scope of the project and to receive external funding (Anurag Shankar and Andy Arenson).
• Patient Recruitment System. Working with Regenstrief scientists, the project will leverage their OpenMRS (Medical Record System) software to create a patient recruitment system for the Indiana CTSI (Andy Arenson).
• The Core's support of Dr. Masatoshi Ando's grant submission to study dental caries (tooth decay) activity over time in the School of Dentistry played a critical role in the proposal being funded successfully. The grant will support 0.5 FTE in the RT Advanced Visualization Lab for a period of three years.
• The National NeuroAIDS Tissue Consortium, Constantin Yiannotsos, PI. The first goal is to deploy the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) microarray data management application, caArray, to store and manage the gene expression data generated by NNTC members. The second goal is to evaluate and deploy such other caBIG software as deemed valuable and necessary to the Consortium (Ganesh Shankar).
• Simon Cancer Center. caBIG deployment lead (Ganesh Shankar).
• ARRA Supplement funding to the Indiana CTSI for the enhancement of collaboration technologies, specifically private collaboration tools and an industry partner discovery tool, i2iconnect (Bill Barnett).

Ongoing projects:

• The development of the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) website (https://www.indianactsi.org/), which will provide Core services and grant applications online, and act to facilitate translational research programs. This site aspires to serve the translational needs of basic and clinical researchers, practitioners, the public, and tech transfer communities.
• The Information Protection for Privacy and Security (IPPS) project, aimed at improving the risk posture of RT systems to make them HIPAA compliant, so that IU health care and related sciences researchers can use them to store and analyze electronic protected health information (ePHI) and other sensitive data for private sector applications.
• The Indiana Center for Excellence in Biomedical Imaging (associated with the IUSM Department of Radiology) is migrating data processing and storage workflow to the Quarry supercomputer at UITS. This has resulted in 50 times faster post-acquisition radio-image processing of 3D PET scan volumes from the lab, which allows the Imaging Core to significantly improve turnaround time.
• Drug discovery research by Dr. Samy Meroueh (Department of Biochemistry and the Center for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics), speeding up computing by two orders of magnitude (a factor of 100) by moving his compute-intensive pharmacokinetic molecular docking and dynamics screening from a small, in-house system to IU's Big Red supercomputer. This has accelerated the ability to identify potential biochemical compounds that target cancer cells to an unprecedented rate, expanding significantly Dr. Meroueh's ability to identify cancer therapy agents.
• The National Gene Vector Biorepository and Coordination Center (NGVBCC), a project led by Dr. Ken Cornetta in the Dept. of Medical and Molecular Biology/Microbiology and Immunology for which the RT Biomedical Applications Group is playing the role of the Informatics Core.
• Tatiana Foroud (Medical and Molecular Genetics): 3D scanning and software support for the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (CIFASD) facial imaging project
• T.K. Li (NIH/NIAAA, formerly IUSM), Ed Riley (UCSD): CIFASD Informatics Core, development of data dictionaries and database infrastructure. William Barnett, PI.

Project sponsor: Craig Stewart, Associate Dean for Research Technologies

Project team:

• William K. Barnett, Core director
• Ganesh Shankar, Advanced IT Core Manager
• Anurag Shankar, Principal Projects Analyst
• Andy Arenson, Manager, Biomedical Applications
• Michael Grobe, Biomedical Applications
• Michel Tavares, Biomedical Applications
• Helen Yezerets, Biomedical Applications
• Jim Mullen, Biomedical Applications
• Joe Rinkovsky, RT Core Services
• Kurt Seiffert, Manager, Research Storage
• Chris Garrison, Research Storage
• Jeff Rogers, Advanced Visualization Lab
• Dave Hancock, Manager, High Performance Systems
• Stephanie Burks, High Performance Systems
• Nancy Long, High Performance Systems
• Robert Henschel, High Performance Applications
• Ray Sheppard, High Performance Applications
• Huian Li, High Performance Applications

Additional information:

• Funding agency: Lilly Endowment, Inc.
• Grant dates: December 2000-December 2008
• Funding to UITS: $6.7 million
• Total funding to IU: $105 million (phase 1) plus $50 million (phase 2)