Enabling e-Science communities

1. Enabling e-Science communities

2. Introduction “PsyGrid: e-Science to facilitate clinical trials and longitudinal studies in first episode psychosis.” • Project initiated in Spring 2005 • MRC and Department of Health funded, approx £ 2.1 M. • Additional funding from MHRN, £0.4 M. • Managed from the University of Manchester • Hosted by North West Institute for Bio-Health Informatics • 8 centres throughout England

3. Rationale • Mental disorders account for 22% of the NHS budget. • Mental Health is one of the 3 main NHS priority areas. • R&D is underdeveloped when compared to cancer or heart disease. • Current R&D tends to be short term and poorly integrated. • Results are poorly fed back to the community as a whole. • MHRN – run jointly by the University of Manchester and the Institute of Psychiatry. • MHRN is a functioning community of researchers and clinicians. • Build an information system on top of the administration system. • Start to definitively address questions about aetiology, outcome prediction, intervention and prevention, and service provision.

4. First Episode Psychosis • The majority of mental health illnesses are psychotic disorders. • Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder • Cost to UK of over £2 billion annually. • Evidence based treatment of psychosis is underdeveloped. • Early intervention is now a political priority. • Delayed detection and treatment predicts poor clinical outcome. • Early intervention teams for the main at risk group, people aged 14-35, need to be established. • Research will inform policy and decision making for the future.

5. 1) Establish an e-Science framework and functioning e-community. Involving integration of academics and NHS partners within the MHRN The goal is to enhance research and development capability in routine mental health setting. Set up an information system to capture and characterise a large cohort of individuals with FEP. To enable hypothesis driven epidemiological and intervention research. The goal is to predict and prevent adverse outcome of FEP in the community. Aims of PsyGrid

6. The application of information technologies to address scientific research questions An infrastructure that enables secure coordination of resources among a collection of individuals A layer of software that connects people to resources Main stages of a software development project Vision: a technical view For PsyGrid to be successful we need a flexible and tractable e-Science/Grid infrastructure. The principles that we use for the development, deploymentandmanagement of the middleware will reflect the current progressing standards in e-Science/Grid.

7. PsyGrid requirements • A virtual research environment for research psychiatrists collaborating on investigations into first episode psychosis and early intervention treatments. • To collect and store longitudinal psychological assessment data from patients with first episode psychosis (FEP) in a secure repository. • The capability to perform statistical analysis on the FEP data stored in the repository and look for correlations with other data sets relevant to psychosis and medical imaging data. • To support clinical trials of early intervention treatments for psychosis, with subjects drawn from the patient data repository. • It will provide the capability to link specially collected clinical research findings about people with FEP with data about their treatment and care reported in routine, national clinical information sources.

8. Wider goals PsyGrid aims to build a generic system that provides these capabilities but that can also be easily adapted and specialised to a specific domain of application. Setting standards for medical systems, not just FEP

9. Foundations To ensure flexibility in PsyGrid the foundations will be constructed in a way that allows new standards, functionalities, services and communities to be incorporated with minimal disruption. • The basis of PsyGrid will include, but not be limited to: • Using a Service-orientated architecture • Building on knowledge from other e-Science projects • Working with established communities in Mental Health and their infrastructure • Building a proof of concept platform • Adoption and support for future directions, such as clinical trials

10. Technical requirements: Security, Authorisation, Administration etc. Portal Instant Messages Workbench Content Management Personalisation Data collection Clinical trials Research Up to date content CPD Assessments Data set designer Stat. analysis Focal point for training and interactions Trial designer Image analysis Assessments Trial Management Workflow Validation Software Architecture Repositoryservices Data Store

11. e-Science projects • e-Science is computationally intensive science. • It is used to help research in areas such as; Bioinformatics, Particle Physics, the Health Sector and Life Sciences. • It can often overlap several disciplines. • Such collaborative scientific enterprises usually require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists. • Current projects PsyGrid collaborate with include:

12. Communities • The community for PsyGrid already exists in the form of the MHRN and extending into the NHS – Our experience. • At the core of the community is the need for a resource to securely store large cohorts of data – Our data repository. • To build on current and previous research to enhance knowledge, add value and feedback to the ‘people on the ground’ – Our portal. • To grow the community to clinical trials and government policy – Based on trust in our system. Coherent and active community that is both informed and informs others about their knowledge.