One of challenges we had to tackle this year for one our customers, The Maastricht Study, was building a Data Download Portal for tranSMART. TranSMART allows you to export all the data just fine by itself, so you might ask why would you need a dedicated app for that. The thing is however, that tranSMART is not a request management system, and in a proper data management system where confidential data is handled, access needs to be organized in a very specific way.
This is why we decided to build a dedicated web application just for managing requests for data access, keeping request management functionality out of tranSMART and providing a clean experience for the end users at the same time. If you are interested in more detail about the project itself or the Data Download Portal, see our poster below. It was presented this year at tranSMART annual meeting in Amsterdam. Enjoy!
Data download portal for The Maastricht Study project
Piotr Zakrzewski1, Tim Hulsen2, Ward Weistra1, Sjoerd van Hagen1, Rianne Jansen1, Ronald van der Meulen3, Carla van der Kallen4,5, Pieter Dagnelie5,6,7
1The Hyve, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2Philips Research, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 3MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 4Department of Internal Medicine, Maastricht University Medical Center+, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 5CARIM School for Cardiovascular Diseases, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 6CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 7Department of Epidemiology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands
This work was financially supported by CTMM TraIT (grant 05T-401)
The Maastricht Study (DMS) is a multidisciplinary, prospective cohort study, carried out in the Maastricht region of the Netherlands. Its goal is to improve the insight into the causes and consequences of chronic diseases, with focus on Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) and its complications. More specifically: to elucidate what genetic, lifestyle, metabolic, and cardiovascular factors are involved in or can predict the development or progression of T2DM, its complications, and other chronic diseases, including the metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological and musculoskeletal diseases. The study started on November 1st, 2010 and data from several thousands of patients have been collected, including biobanking data (blood, urine and exhaled air samples), data from questionnaires (lifestyle, food frequency, socio-economic factors, etc.), imaging data (US, ECG, MRI, etc.), blood pressure data, data from physical examinations and many more.
As part of the IT infrastructure of TMS, a data warehouse platform is being set up in a CTMM Translational Research IT (TraIT) project. In this project, tranSMART has been chosen as the data integration platform, in which the processed data from TMS is stored. To allow researchers to request access to this valuable dataset, CTMM TraIT has developed a data request and download portal on top of the tranSMART platform. After receiving an account for the DMS download portal, researchers can view study summary statistics and can place a request including, amongst others, the variables of interest and the research question for which they plan to use this data. Placed requests will be judged by a data access committee and on approval the data will be downloaded from tranSMART and prepared as a download for the researcher.
The Data Portal for handling request procedure and downloading the data is also a showcase of using RESTful API in tranSMART. This functionality allows for easier integration of custom web and desktop applications with tranSMART. The application follows the typical architecture for a new tranSMART-integrated app: it connects via OAuth to the tranSMART RESTful API and presents the data in a rich AngularJs Frontend.
