Federating Heterogeneous Datasets to Enhance Data Sharing and Experiment Reproducibility

Recent studies have demonstrated the difficulties to replicate scientific findings and/or experiments published in past.¹ The effects seen in the replicated experiments were smaller than previously reported. Some of the explanations for these findings include the complexity of the experimental design and the pressure on researches to report positive findings. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) suggests that every study considered for publication must submit a plan to share the de-identified patient data no later than 6 months after publication. There is a growing demand to enhance the management of clinical data, facilitate data sharing across institutions and also to keep track of the data from previous experiments. The ultimate goal is to assure the reproducibility of experiments in the future. This paper describes Shiny-tooth, a web based application created to improve clinical data acquisition during the clinical trial; data federation of such data as well as morphological data derived from medical images; Currently, this application is being used to store clinical data from an osteoarthritis (OA) study. This work is submitted to the SPIE Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging conference.