Authors
Steve Quenette (VPAC), David Morrison (VPAC), Anne Thompson (Victorian Cancer Biobank), and Mike Rebbechi (AARNet)
Abstract
The Victorian Cancer Biobank (Biobank) is a not-for-profit large-scale tissue-banking facility built on the expertise of four Consortium member tissue banks located at Austin Health, Melbourne Health, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Southern Health. The Biobank aims to provide high quality clinically annotated biospecimens to researchers in academia and industry within Australia and internationally.
Within the Biobank quality assurance, tissues, blood and derived biospecimens are processed and stored at the four hub sites. The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) and the Biobank have commenced working together on an innovative eResearch project that will integrate the inventory management and digital pathology systems and provide digital biobanking functionality that is not currently available. Both software systems are hosted by VPAC within its sensitive data facility. The federation of these systems occurs over a VPAC managed VPN in am manner that utilizes technology, conventions and architecture that satisfy the culture, security and privacy concerns of four of Melbourne’s large health service providers.
The major challenge of the transition to digital pathology is the dealing with the amount of data storage and data bandwidth required. A typical slide of 20mm x15mm at 20X (.5micron/pixel) requires 1.2Gpixels of storage or 3.6GB. When compressed, this yields to about 200 to 500 MB per image. To put this into perspective, one year’s worth of digital imaging of clinical pathology can create in the order of 55,000 images. That is approximately 30TB of data created per year.
The reality is that few medical campuses have access to the bandwidth to support collaborative, data intensive research activities to this fidelity. Hence, in order to realise the benefits to translational research potential that the Biobank platform can provide, the Biobank has worked in collaboration with VPAC and AARNet to devise a cost effective high bandwidth network infrastructure across the partner sites, for research purposes.
About the speaker
Steve Quenette is the manager and senior technical advisor to Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing's (VPAC) computational geophysics and health informatics initiatives. He is also the Project Director of AuScope Simulation, Analysis & Modelling (SAM) Victoria, and leads the energy program with AuScope SAM.
Steve has been the chief architect and project manager of several multi-site health informatics initiatives in Victoria, for both research and performance management purposes. His professional experiences include business management, quality assurance and fit for purpose auditing of software for commercialisation. He has an established history of practise and research into software frameworks for health, geophysics, finite element and defence event driven simulation domains.