A rigorous approach to facilitate and guarantee the correctness of the genetic testing management in human genome information systems

Abstract

BackgroundRecent medical and biological technology advances have stimulated the development of new testing systems that have been providing huge, varied amounts of molecular and clinical data. Growing data volumes pose significant challenges for information processing systems in research centers. Additionally, the routines of genomics laboratory are typically characterized by high parallelism in testing and constant procedure changes.ResultsThis paper describes a formal approach to address this challenge through the implementation of a genetic testing management system applied to human genome laboratory. We introduced the Human Genome Research Center Information System (CEGH) in Brazil, a system that is able to support constant changes in human genome testing and can provide patients updated results based on the most recent and validated genetic knowledge. Our approach uses a common repository for process planning to ensure reusability, specification, instantiation, monitoring, and execution of processes, which are defined using a relational database and rigorous control flow specifications based on process algebra (ACP). The main difference between our approach and related works is that we were able to join two important aspects: 1) process scalability achieved through relational database implementation, and 2) correctness of processes using process algebra. Furthermore, the software allows end users to define genetic testing without requiring any knowledge about business process notation or process algebra.ConclusionsThis paper presents the CEGH information system that is a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) based on a formal framework to support genetic testing management for Mendelian disorder studies. We have proved the feasibility and showed usability benefits of a rigorous approach that is able to specify, validate, and perform genetic testing using easy end user interfaces.

A Health Mobile Application and Architecture to Support and Automate In-home Consultation

“…2, mCare was designed to centralize and manage patient health records, in order to provide support not only to the health team, but also to patients, regarding treatment adherence. In this architecture, mCare plays a special role to support health care visits and to provide the data collected in the consultations to other healthcare applications, such as: genetic test management [12], drug resistance [13], and patient health record [14]. The current approach for integration is directly exporting the data generated in mCare for other applications to import and handle, but future work includes exploring alternatives in data exchange.…”