VPH-DARE@IT Biomedical Research Platform - Architectural Framework Design and Interoperability

The “Virtual Physiological Human: Dementia Research Enabled by IT” (VPH-DARE@IT) project aims to provide a systematic, multifactorial and multiscale modelling approach to enable improved diagnoses and prognoses of dementias. Whilst several tools are available for isolated tasks in the analysis of brain or brain-related data, a widely accepted solution to collect and harmonise, analyse, and organise data for the modelling of dementias is not yet available. The lack of such tools has been identified as a major challenge with high impact. The VPH-DARE@IT research platform aims to integrate the efforts of project partners and also of other open-source tools, which are already available and focus on

dementia research, with the goal of providing a single framework where relevant anatomic-physiological representations (e.g. biomarkers & measures) are generated or co-ordinated to create more objective and predictive models of patients’ medical condition progression. The specific objectives of the research platform are to:

 Develop a workflow-oriented and extensible framework for clinical researchers in

dementia;

 Develop a workflow-oriented and extensible framework for VPH modelling

researchers in dementia;

 Define and implement automated pipelines for data processing in VPH-DARE@IT; 

 Define interoperability mechanisms for integrating the multi-faceted contributions of

project partners into a single point of service;

 Re-use these interoperability mechanisms for leveraging functionality from other

open source frameworks in dementia research;

 Support the interaction and integration of such frameworks with the VPH-Share data

sharing infrastructure;

 Support data-provision centres in VPH-DARE@IT to federate their databases through

the VPH-Share infrastructure.

This deliverable aims to describe the architecture of the VPH-DARE@IT research platform, including its relationship with the other main software product of the project – the clinical platform. The approach taken for this document follows the ISO/IEC 42010-2011 standard “System and software engineering – Architecture description” as a guideline for its structure and contents.