Engineering knowledge exchange for translational research informatics

Abstract

Engineering effective knowledge exchange pathways between scientists and clinicians will accelerate the development and improvement of clinical treatments extracted from lab bench experiments. Many standards development organizations in the field of translational research informatics have attempted to prescribe mechanisms which would provide these knowledge exchange pathways; however, concrete implementations of these standards and the software structures which support them are still lacking. We have explored key technologies and techniques which may facilitate knowledge exchange through clinical coding, a domain specific version of the more general technique of semantic annotation. During the development process we identified and provided potential solutions to four primary problem areas in engineering software enabled knowledge exchange pathways for translational research: architecture, terminology, validation and interface design. We provide both a technical and practical evaluation of a multicomponent architecture which was conceived as a mechanism for producing knowledge exchange pathways between researchers in the field of cancer informatics; however, the principles and process which we apply to cancer informatics could easily be applied to other areas of clinical informatics.