Live Stream of the MIRACUM Online Symposium
We have currently more than 250 registrations for our MIRACUM Online Symposium and there are continuously new requests for participation. Therefore we have now managed (in addition to our Zoom web conference) to stream the Online Symposium also on Youtube.
The stream will be available between 10 am and 3pm on Friday, 27.03.2020.
Interested? Join us! ➜ YouTube
Job Offer: (Medical) computer scientist in personalized oncology (UKSH, Campus Lübeck)
As part of the MII, the UKSH Campus Lübeck is cooperating with MIRACUM in an interdisciplinary project on molecular tumor boards. The aim is to develop standardized methods, quality management and knowledge databases for molecular interpretation and clinical interpretation of the results. For this project we are looking for a (medical) computer scientist in the field of personalized oncology to strengthen our team.
Interested? Read more!
Finally: Launch of the international terminology standard SNOMED-CT in Germany
With immediate effect, all participants of the medical informatics initiative and their cooperation partners can obtain a free SNOMED CT license. It represents an important step for medical research. Thanks to SNOMEND CT, different terms in medical documentation can now be translated into an internationally uniform code. In this way, clinical data can be made comparable not only throughout Germany, but also internationally. This is an essential prerequisite for better research and treatment of diseases in the future.
Currently, this is still a “pilot phase”, which initially only allows MII sites to access SNOMED CT. For this purpose, the license fees are paid by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. However, the Federal Ministry of Health is also planning to extend this to the entire area of care in the near future.
Further information: Press release BMBF and MII SNOMED CT FAQ
MIRACUM Symposium on Friday 27th of March 2020 as Online Symposium
The MIRACUM Consortium has decided to hold its Annual Symposium as an Online Symposium in a shorter version than originally planned.
We have organized two sessions with a lunch break in between.
27.03.2020 / 10.00 – 11.30 / Session 1:
- the MIRACUM Master Course on Biomedical Informatics and Medical Data Science
- Results and News from the MII Working Groups
27.03.2020 / 12.45 – 15.00 / Session 2:
- MIRACUM DIZ Components and ETL Processes
- Live Demonstration of the MIRACUM Research Portal
The full program details are available via “Program Online Symposium”
Everybody who is already registered for the Symposium will soon receive the access details for the Online Symposium.
If you are not yet registered, but interested to participate in the MIRACUM Online-Symposium please send a short mail with your name and institution to info@miracum.de.
The number of total participants is limited – thus we will provide access details as long as this limit is not yet reached.
COVID19: MIRACUM Symposium in Freiburg is cancelled and will be substituted by a small online conference
Dear interested participants of the MIRACUM Symposium,
In order to protect patients and employees, the Freiburg University Hospital board of directors has decided to cancel all public events at the Freiburg University Hospital until 5 April 2020. In addition, many of you are already affected by travel restrictions, so we would have had to expect a significant reduction in the number of participants.
For this reason, the MIRACUM Symposium in its previously planned form as a local event in Freiburg cannot take place.
However, since we know the commitment with which many of our team members have worked towards this date and pushed developments forward, we do not want to simply cover this up under the “corona cloack of silence”. In a small task force we will discuss the details in the next few days in order to determine which parts of the planned symposium we will be able to implement online/virtually and via webinar at the end of March.
Thus, we are planning a web-based event via ZOOM on only one of the two announced days (March 26 or 27). In the center of this event the announced live demo will be presented, which we want to give room for sufficient questions and discussion afterwards. Surrounding this demonstration, we will arrange some presentations that cover particularly interesting topics.
However, since the feeling of meeting, exchanging and also of informal casual celebrating together can in no way be replaced by virtual conferences, we will try to find a suitable date in the second week of October (KW41) for a symposium “genuinely on site in beautiful Freiburg”.
Within the next few days we will publish the results of these alternative considerations both by mail and on the MIRACUM homepage.
We ask for your understanding that we had to make this decision in view of the current conditions, but we hope to be able to offer an attractive alternative in the short term. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the MIRACUM office (info@miracum.de).
Kind regards
Ulli Prokosch and the MIRACUM Steering Board
Status: 11.03.2020
Polar_mi: Towards higher medication safety by using MII infrastructures
21 interdisciplinar partners have joined forces in the polar_mi research project (Polypharmacy, drug-drug-interactions and risks) to improve drug therapy and enhance patient safety. The project started in February 2020 and is funded with 5,5 million euros. It builds on the infrastructures already established within the medical informatics initiative (MII) and unites research teams from all four MII consortia. MIRACUM is represented by four data integration centres and its strong input on the interoperability level (Martin Boeker and Thomas Ganslandt). Moreover, the polar_mi pharma team is led by Martin Fromm and Renke Maas from Erlangen.
Follow this link for more detailed information from the KickOff meeting in Leipzig.
Coronavirus COVID19 – Information for the MIRACUM Symposium 2020
Due to the current developments of the coronavirus COVID 19 in Germany we also discuss which actions to take for the MIRACUM symposium in Freiburg. However, we have already committed ourselves to the following decision:
The MIRACUM symposium will definitely take place! – either live in Freiburg or virtually online.
The MIRACUM Steering Board will decide next Tuesday, 10.03.2020, whether the event will take place in Freiburg or whether we will switch to web-based technology (e.g. ZOOM) to offer the symposium remotely. We therefore ask for patience until next Tuesday.
If any questions arise until then, please feel free to contact the MIRACUM central office (stefanie.toddenroth@fau.de) or the symposium organization: Ms. Hanna Hasselblatt (hasselblatt@imbi.uni-freiburg.de). In any case, we will keep you informed about further developments.
Your MIRACUM Team
Status: 05.03.2020
Political evening of the Medical Informatics Initiative
Following the first NSG meeting of the year, the MII invited to a political evening on 13.02.2020. In a top-class panel discussion achievements of the first two years, remaining challenges and future goals were discussed in order to further advance medical research for faster diagnoses and targeted therapies in Germany.
After a welcome word by Christian Luft (State Secretary, Federal Minister of Education and Research), three keynote speeches provided initial impulses on the evening’s topic. Thereby the talks of Dr. Thomas Kostera (Bertelsmann Foundation), Esti Shelly (Head of Department Digitalization of the Israeli Ministry of Health) and Dr. med. Markus Leyck Dieken (gematik) illustrated the current gaps in health care digitalization between the German and the Israelian Health System. Markus Leyck Diecken, however, also mentioned new organizational structures and agile project approaches within the Gematik and announced a “race to catch up” and the research compatible ePA for 2023.
In addition to two members of the Bundestag, Stephan Albani (CDU/CSU) and Maria Klein-Schmeink (B90/Greens), Dr. Thomas Kriedel from the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV) also took part in the subsequent discussion. Prof. Dr. Ulli Prokosch, who represented the National Steering Committee of the MII as consortium leader of MIRACUM, completed the panel. In the discussion, which was moderated by Rebecca Beerheide (Deutsches Ärzteblatt), special attention was paid to the Patient Data Protection Act (PDSG) which is now available as a draft bill. Within the scope of the MII, this proposed paper is of great interest, especially with regard to the national Licensing of SNOMED CT, the establishment of a German Terminology Competence Center and data donations. As an important step of alignment between the MII and the KBV activities, Ulli Prokosch and Thomas Kriedel both highlighted the established cooperation in defining the MII core data set modules as well as the upcoming ePA medical information objects (MIOs) as FHIR profiles. While those semantic alignments were seen very positive, Ulli Prokosch, however, criticized some further aspects of the current PDSG draft regarding the planned research data center which would hinder a long term integration of the wealth of data currently being consolidated in the German university medicine data integration centers with contents in the future ePA. He therefore emphasized the urgent need to come to an agreement between the MII and the German state data protection officers concerning the specimen text for a modular broad consent.
Overall, important aspects for medical research, which will be highly relevant in the coming months, were addressed at this evening.
Specification for a cBioPortal-based platform to support the Molecular Tumor Board published
Clinicians in molecular tumor boards (MTB) are confronted with a growing amount of high-throughput sequencing data. Today, at German university hospitals, these data are usually handled in complex spreadsheets from which clinicians have to obtain the necessary information. A subgoal of the MIRACUM Use Case 3 (“From Knowledge to Action – Support for Molecular Tumor Boards“) was to gather a comprehensive list of requirements to be met by cBioPortal to support processes in MTBs according to clinical needs. cBioPortal is a platform that provides functions to – among others – analyze and visualize Next Generation Sequencing data and was selected as the foundation for the future implementation of the requirements identified.
To achive this goal, oncology experts at nine German university hospitals were surveyed in two rounds of interviews and in preparation for this a scoping review of possible relevant tools was conducted. For visual support in the second round, screenshot mockups illustrating the requirements from the first round were created. In the end, 24 requirements with sometimes several conceivable options were identified and 54 screenshot mockups were created. Some of the identified requirements have already been suggested to the community by other users or are currently being implemented in cBioPortal. This shows, that the results are in line with the needs expressed by various disciplines. According to our findings, cBioPortal has the potential to significantly improve the processes and analyses of an MTB after the implementation of the identified requirements.
The results of this very successful MIRACUM-wide collaboration have just been peer reviewed and published in the journal Diagnostics (https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics10020093).
In the meantime we have started to implement the most important and still missing functions for MTB in cBioPortal.
(The picture was adopted from the original publication and slightly modified. Example data were adopted from the public cBioPortal (https://cbioportal.org) and OncoKB (https://www.oncokb.org/).)
MIRACUM-Pipe was certified by NGS ring trial
The Institute of Medical Bioinformatics and Systems Medicine at the Medical Center – University of Freiburg has successfully participated in the Next-Generation-Sequencing 2019 ring trials of the Professional Association of German Human Geneticists (BVDH, Berufsverband Deutscher Humangenetiker e.V.). The MIRACUM-Pipe (R/Bash), which was developed within the MIRACUM project in the Molecular Tumour Board Use Case 3, was used for the analysis pipeline for variant detection and could fulfil all necessary criteria and obtained the certification.
