Publications

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115 Publications visible to you, out of a total of 115

Abstract (Expand)

The digitisation of historical documents, particularly those containing tabular data, is becoming increasingly critical for the preservation of information and analysis of long-term trends. However, this task presents significant challenges, particularly with semi-formal documents like handwritten records, which often need more consistent structure. This paper addresses the challenge of developing an automated approach for transcribing historical handwritten tables. Our presented method works on a mixture of computer vision tools and optical character recognition (OCR) to detect the grid and content of the table. The dataset we collected contains records from beekeepers, consisting of hive weight gain and loss and meteorological conditions. The Institute of Bee Protection at JKI gathered this information from the German beekeeper associations of Lower Saxony, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in Germany within the collaborative research project MonViA. This data is crucial for understanding the impact of climate change on bee vitality and contains daily information from each beekeeper over decades, holding valuable insights into past environmental conditions. The success rate of automatically transcribed hive scale data from Lower Saxony was compared with the accuracy of transcription done by human power. Our dataset of 14\,738 handwritten scans, out of which 3819 were manually digitised, provides a large ground truth for future research, paving the way for further exploration and uncovering other historical knowledge.

Authors: Lukrécia Mertová, Severin Polreich, Oleg Lewkovski, Wolfgang Müller

Date Published: 13th Mar 2025

Publication Type: InProceedings

Abstract (Expand)

As part of the BioHackathon Europe 2024, we here report on the progress that both project 19 and project 24 have made during the event. For the purpose of this report we will present the abstract of abstract of both projects and then dive deeper on what work was done during the BioHackathon.

Authors: Sebastian Beier, Daniel Arend, Daniel Bauer, Marco Brandizi, Dominik Brilhaus, Eli Chadwick, Vera Clemens, Michael Robin Crusoe, Manuel Feser, Jonas Grieb, Xiaoming Hu, Abigail Miller, Timo Mühlhaus, Stuart Owen, Maja Rey, Gabriel Schneider, Julian Schneider, Kevin Schneider, Heinrich Lukas Weil, Florian Wetzels

Date Published: 2nd Feb 2025

Publication Type: Tech report

Abstract (Expand)

Introduction: NFDI4Health is a consortium funded by the German Research Foundation to make structured health data findable and accessible internationally according to the FAIR principles. Its goal iss. Its goal is bringing data users and Data Holding Organizations (DHOs) together. It mainly considers DHOs conducting epidemiological and public health studies or clinical trials. Methods: Local data hubs (LDH) are provided for such DHOs to connect decentralized local research data management within their organizations with the option of publishing shareable metadata via centralized NFDI4Health services such as the German central Health Study Hub. The LDH platform is based on FAIRDOM SEEK and provides a complete and flexible, locally controlled data and information management platform for health research data. A tailored NFDI4Health metadata schema for studies and their corresponding resources has been developed which is fully supported by the LDH software, e.g. for metadata transfer to other NFDI4Health services. Results: The SEEK platform has been technically enhanced to support extended metadata structures tailored to the needs of the user communities in addition to the existing metadata structuring of SEEK. Conclusion: With the LDH and the MDS, the NFDI4Health provides all DHOs with a standardized and free and open source research data management platform for the FAIR exchange of structured health data.

Authors: Xiaoming Hu, Haitham Abaza, Rene Hänsel, Masoud Abedi, Martin Golebiewski, Wolfgang Müller, Frank Meineke

Date Published: 30th Aug 2024

Publication Type: InProceedings

Abstract (Expand)

The National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data (NFDI4Health) uses Local Data Hubs (LDHs) to manage locally research studies, documents and sensitive personal data to support controlledort controlled data sharing. While research data management (RDM) systems facilitate the storage and preparation of data and metadata as well as organizational access, they often lack support for interoperability standards of the application domain. To support the exchange with external registries of research studies, we chose 17 attributes to characterize the most relevant aspects of clinical trials (in the following named “metadata profile”). We implemented the metadata profile in the RDM system FAIRDOM SEEK using core attributes and SEEK’s extended metadata feature and created a mapping conforming to the Health Level 7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard version R4. Finally, we implemented a prototype application interface for exports in FHIR-JSON format. We plan to extend the interface to serve central registries and support specific FHIR Implementation Guides from various use cases.

Authors: Matthias Löbe, Xiaoming Hu, Sophie A.I. Klopfenstein

Date Published: 22nd Aug 2024

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

The German initiative "National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data" (NFDI4Health) focuses on research data management in health research. It aims to foster and develop harmonized informatics standards for public health, epidemiological studies, and clinical trials, facilitating access to relevant data and metadata standards. This publication lists syntactic and semantic data standards of potential use for NFDI4Health and beyond, based on interdisciplinary meetings and workshops, mappings of study questionnaires and the NFDI4Health metadata schema, and literature search. Included are 7 syntactic, 32 semantic and 9 combined syntactic and semantic standards. In addition, 101 ISO Standards from ISO/TC 215 Health Informatics and ISO/TC 276 Biotechnology could be identified as being potentially relevant. The work emphasizes the utilization of standards for epidemiological and health research data ensuring interoperability as well as the compatibility to NFDI4Health, its use cases, and to (inter-)national efforts within these sectors. The goal is to foster collaborative and inter-sectoral work in health research and initiate a debate around the potential of using common standards.

Authors: C. N. Vorisek, S. A. I. Klopfenstein, M. Lobe, C. O. Schmidt, P. J. Mayer, M. Golebiewski, S. Thun

Date Published: 13th Jul 2024

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

Abstract FAIRification of personal health data is of utmost importance to improve health research and political as well as medical decision-making, which ultimately contributes to a better health ofutes to a better health of the general population. Despite the many advances in information technology, several obstacles such as interoperability problems remain and relevant research on the health topic of interest is likely to be missed out due to time-consuming search and access processes. A recent example is the COVID-19 pandemic, where a better understanding of the virus’ transmission dynamics as well as preventive and therapeutic options would have improved public health and medical decision-making. Consequently, the NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19 was established to foster the FAIRification of German COVID-19 studies. This paper describes the various steps that have been taken to create low barrier workflows for scientists in finding and accessing German COVID-19 research. It provides an overview on the building blocks for FAIR health research within the Task Force COVID-19 and how this initial work was subsequently expanded by the German consortium National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data (NFDI4Health) to cover a wider range of studies and research areas in epidemiological, public health and clinical research. Lessons learned from the Task Force helped to improve the respective tasks of NFDI4Health.

Authors: Iris Pigeot, Wolfgang Ahrens, Johannes Darms, Juliane Fluck, Martin Golebiewski, Horst K. Hahn, Xiaoming Hu, Timm Intemann, Elisa Kasbohm, Toralf Kirsten, Sebastian Klammt, Sophie Anne Ines Klopfenstein, Bianca Lassen-Schmidt, Manuela Peters, Ulrich Sax, Dagmar Waltemath, Carsten Oliver Schmidt

Date Published: 1st Jul 2024

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract

Not specified

Authors: M. Golebiewski, G. Bader, P. Gleeson, T. E. Gorochowski, S. M. Keating, M. Konig, C. J. Myers, D. P. Nickerson, B. Sommer, D. Waltemath, F. Schreiber

Date Published: 1st Mar 2024

Publication Type: Journal

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