The BioRef Infrastructure, a Framework for Real-Time, Federated, Privacy-Preserving, and Personalized Reference Intervals: Design, Development, and Application

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Copyright: JMIR Publications
URL: https://www.jmir.org/2023/1/e47254
License: Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Reference intervals (RIs) are being used across many medical disciplines, allowing physicians to quickly pinpoint potentially pathological test results. RIs vary between populations and individuals, but, so far, personalized RIs are cumbersome to obtain.

Researchers from the BioRef consortium of the University Hospital Bern (Inselspital), University Hospital Lausanne (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois [CHUV]), the University Children’s Hospital Zürich (Kinderspital Zürich), and Swiss Paraplegic Research have established a multicentric IT framework in collaboration with Tune Insight and the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) to obtain patient group–specific RIs from routine laboratory data. This infrastructure, BioRef TI4Health, is the first of its kind featuring a federated network where patient data remain at each participating hospital, yet allowing a real-time joint evaluation secured by homomorphic encryption.

This enables clinical physicians and researchers to interactively define precise RIs in a privacy-preserving, reproducible manner, streamlining compliance and promoting a vital part of precision medicine while offering maximum patient privacy protection.

Read the study describing the approach and results published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research: https://www.jmir.org/2023/1/e47254.

Following is a link to the Swiss BioRef project (SPHN-funded): https://sphn.ch/network/projects-old/infrastructure-development-projects/project-page_swissbioref/.

#labdata #personalizedmedicine #dataprotection #federatedlearning #multicenter #research #diagnosis #dataanalysis #aiinhealthcare #datascience #medicine @Insel Gruppe @CHUV @KISPI @Paraplegikerforschung @SPHN (please also add Tune Insight (see https://tuneinsight.com/) and BioMedIT (see https://www.biomedit.ch/)).