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September 2024 Hybrid F2F Meeting

Overview

The NHLBI BioData Catalyst (BDC)® September 2024 Quarterly Meeting was held virtually via Zoom on September 10-11, 2024. The event was attended by 82 people total across the two days and included the BDC consortium members, NHLBI staff, and External Expert Panel (EEP) members.

The main goals for this meeting were to (A) review recent wins for the consortium, both in advances made in the ingest of Imaging Data, AI integration, and the user journey, (B) announce the successful launch of the interim BioData Catalyst website and a demo of it’s content, and (C) introduce the new ARPA-H BDF performer teams along with a review of their scope of work.

The meeting was kicked off with housekeeping items, including welcoming our new External Expert Panel (EEP) member, Marylyn Ritchie, and reminding attendees of the outcomes from our previous June QM and work done to date on appropriate action items.

Day 1 focused on a series of presentations and discussions introducing the new ARPA-H Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) project teams, including Geneial, Verily, RENCI, and The University of Chicago, and a review of their proposed scope of work. We also received updates on imaging data ingest, and we reviewed the current AI and machine learning capabilities on BioData Catalyst, highlighting the applicability of these technologies to multimodal data use cases. The Growth and Retention team presented how BDC3 analyzes user investigator journeys to understand user needs better and tailor the BDC experience.

Day 2 started with announcing the interim BioData Catalyst website, demoing diverse content and usage. Then, we heard updates from the Dug team on advancements of the Dug Semantic Search, with improved functionality and external integrations. The second day continued with a presentation from the DMC on its unified data model and how they are continuing to refine this collaborative process, which will include data ingestions, mapping strategies, and scaling up the curations process. We also heard from an expert about the importance of flexible data harmonization tools like LinkML to better meet researchers’ needs.

The meeting concluded with debriefs from the EEP members and NHLBI representatives, who praised progress in AI/LLM developments, interoperability efforts, and platform maturity, with excitement around future AI capabilities. They also acknowledged the team’s communication and metric development improvements, along with website advancements. The NHLBI fireside discussion brought further praise for BDC’s organization, a welcome to the new ARPA-H projects, and the evolving data model, signaling a solid momentum as we head into the next phase.

Virtual Meeting Recordings

Day 1 Presentations (09/10/24)

Day 2 Presentations (09/11/24)