NCBO User Profile: Raimond L. Winslow, PhD, The Johns Hopkins University
CardioVascular Research Grid (CVRG)
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Raimond L. Winslow, PhD
Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Director, Institute for Computational Medicine
Director, Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling
The Johns Hopkins University
Research Interests: Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the most common inherited heart condition. It presents with arrhythmias, heart failure and sudden cardiac death. It is in fact the most common cause of sudden death in athletes and those below 30 years of age. A common finding in subjects with HCM is electrocardiographic (ECG) abnormalities. However, not every HCM patient has ECG abnormalities and the implications of ECG abnormalities in HCM remain vague. Dr. Abraham recently constituted a HCM consortium consisting of HCM Centers of Excellence across the world with a view to bring together a large, well-characterized cohort of HCM patients. One of the primary objectives of this consortium is to investigate the potential role of ECG abnormalities in predicting risk.
In their work within the CardioVascular Research Grid (CVRG), Dr. Winslow and Mr. Granite have developed tools for the management, presentation and annotation of time series data, specifically (ECGs). ECGs are ubiquitous in medicine, from measurements of general health to specific diagnoses of cardiovascular disease. However, aggregation and sharing of ECG annotations is quite difficult due to the absence of agreement in the definition and classification of these measurements and diagnoses.
Need for NCBO Services:
One approach to addressing the challenges of classification mapping and standardization is the use of an application ontology to centralize these terms and present them to the community in a uniform manner. The NCBO REST Services address this problem by providing a rapid response method to retrieve an ontology term and return the definition of the selected term through another request.
Specific Uses of NCBO Services:
Within the ECGrid Toolkit, Dr. Winslow, Mr. Granite and other members of the CVRG team have developed a fully functional web interface that uses web services to store, retrieve, visualize and annotate, and analyze ECG time-series in an access-controlled manner (Figure 1). Through the visualization interface, end users can display time-series data for one or more arrays within an ECG dataset (i.e., an ECG lead’s data). By clicking on a point in the time-series, the Toolkit invokes an annotation screen. Within the annotation screen, the CVRG team embedded the OntologyTree Widget developed by the NCBO, to call the NCBO REST Services and display a hierarchical representation of the ECG Ontology (Figure 2). Upon selection of a term, the Toolkit calls the NCBO REST Services again, retrieving the definition for the ontology term selected. More information on the Toolkit itself can be found at the CVRG website.
The availability of the ECGrid Toolkit in the CVRG allows the HCM consortium to process large volumes of ECGs, gain access to several automated ECG analysis algorithms and annotate ECGs and the analysis results with terms from the ECG Ontology. The same work done manually would not only take several individuals and many years but is likely not feasible in the current environment. The ECGrid Toolkit will allow us to generate and test new hypotheses concerning the value of ECG in HCM management.
