Health Sciences
The Health Sciences Initiative works with Internet2 members, affiliates and industry partners to support innovation and advanced networking technologies and services that address the needs of healthcare, biomedical research and medical education.
Contact us
Michael Sullivan, M.D.
Associate Director, Health Sciences Initiative
msullivan@internet2.edu
CINC – Wisconsin's Model Community Area Network
The Chippewa Valley Inter-networking Consortium (CINC) is a regional Community Area Network (CAN) formed in 1999 and committed to "Broadband Serving the Public Interest." CINC coordinates regional communication infrastructure projects involving city, county and state government, educational institutions, libraries, hospitals, nonprofits, and technology providers. CINC's innovative approach has led to economic development in the Chippewa Valley, and health care facilities have found several ways to leverage CINC infrastructure. Read more...U.S. UCAN Affiliate Program
The U.S. Unified Community Anchor Network (U.S. UCAN) has announced the selection of 14 affiliate program participants to facilitate advanced and innovative broadband applications to help community anchor institutions. These initial affiliates will work with U.S. UCAN to expand the program throughout 2012. The announcement was made at The Quilt and StateNets Joint Winter 2012 Meeting. Read more...
Well-Architected Networks – Genomics
Matthew Trunnell, Director of Advanced Networks at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, gave a presentation at the Joint Techs Meeting in Baton Rouge on January 24th about advances in genomics and their effect on network design and data management. The Broad Institute participates in several large-scale genomics projects that have generated petabytes of data forcing tradeoffs to keep costs within reason. Data recovery and backup strategies have to be rethought. Challenges to data sharing and collaboration include disparate data repositories, access control restrictions, and moving large datasets. Read more...
Big Data and Advanced Networking
Biomedical research has become an information science that deals with Big Data. The high-energy physics community has the most experience moving massive datasets around. They have developed a network architecture called the "Science DMZ"—a dedicated portion of an organization's network that serves high-performance science applications. Science DMZ hardware, software, and security policies are all tailored to support high-speed data flows. Three ESnet engineers recently explained how to build a Science DMZ and Joe Breen described its implementation at the University of Utah. Learn more...
Advanced broadband services are enabling patients to receive improved healthcare, healthcare providers to benefit from richer resources and collaborations—and often, costs are significantly reduced. Read these recent case studies for more details...
Community area network integrates hospitals
to create single "care-coordinated" region
Taking a collaborative, broadband approach, hospitals in Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, integrated departments, IT applications and processes to provide superior healthcare to their patients at reduced costs. The integration was accomplished through the Chippewa Valley Inter-Networking Consortium (CINC, see sidebar), a community area network (CAN) that helped the hospitals bridge the digital divide to reliably and seamlessly share applications and processes. Read the case study (PDF).
Hospitals share reliable, cost-effective
data backup solution
Find out how two Wisconsin hospitals created a reliable, cost-effective storage and backup solution using community area network metro cluster technology. Now if a network disaster strikes, critical patient data stays online and accessible instead of requiring a 430 mile trip and 24 hours downtime while data is restored. Read more (PDF).
Dove Healthcare solves critical cloud services problems through community area network
Before joining CINC (see sidebar), Dove Healthcare struggled with slow, unreliable application and software delivery from its cloud services provider. Now this multi-site, Western Wisconsin healthcare provider offers better patient care—thanks to dramatic improvements in application performance, employee satisfaction and support. Read the recent case study (PDF) for details.
Hospitals, public and private stakeholders
create tele-radiology imaging hub
For Western Wisconsin and Eastern Minnesota residents, the lack of immediate radiological services and imaging could mean the difference between life and death. Find out how a public-private collaborative broadband approach has brought reliable, efficient and cost-effective teleradiology services to hospitals and clinics in their own localities. Read more (PDF).
See how the Chippewa Valley Inter-networking Consortium (CINC) is making better healthcare a reality for Wisconsin residents. (Read more below.)
Resources
Visualizing Big Data Transport in Biomedical Collaborations – Internet2 Portal project case study (PDF)
"Well Architected Networks (Genomics)," by Matthew Trunnell (PDF)
Watch a netcast of Matthew Trunnell's presentation, "Well Architected Networks (Genomics)," presented January 24, 2012, at the Winter 2012 ESCC/Joint Techs meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
At the same meeting, three ESnet engineers explained how to build a Science DMZ and Joe Breen described its implementation at the University of Utah.
Internet2 Portal Project Case Study: Visualizing Big Data Transport in Biomedical Collaborations
This past winter, Internet2 kicked off a web portal initiative to help members see how they are using Internet2 services. The first version of the portal provides a visualization of Internet2 Network traffic—data rates, volumes, and performance measures. In the future, it will also display the use of services, for example, the number of certificates obtained from Internet2's InCommon Certificates service. Here's an actual network collaboration that illustrates the portal's initial capabilities for network traffic visualization.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) hosts biomedical research data. One major research focus is to identify common variations in the human genome. The 1000 Genomes Project is tackling this challenge by sequencing and comparing the genomes of thousands of people with varying ethnicity. Other research has the goal of improving our ability to diagnose, treat and prevent cancer. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is recording the genetic changes found in different kinds of cancer and making that data freely available. Researchers who accept NIH awards agree to make their results public and to upload them to NCBI databases. NCBI assigns unique identifiers and stores the results in genomic databases that contain hundreds of terabytes of sequence data. Other researchers can then search and download known genomic sequences that enable them to analyze new results. The ratio of outbound to inbound data at NCBI is roughly 10 to 1, underscoring the wide use of NCBI data and its importance in genomic research collaborations.
NCBI, European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) make up the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC). The three INSDC members collaborate to make sure each genomic sequence is assigned a globally unique identifier. They also synchronize data with one another, resulting in big data flows. The Internet2 Network Portal helps visualize this traffic. The map below highlights one such flow from EBI in Hinxton, England, to NLM in Bethesda, MD. NCBI plans to use the portal's capabilities to examine characteristics of its inbound and outbound traffic in order to improve data exchange with researchers. The portal's capabilities will expand to include additional properties based upon members' requests.
Help build the Internet2 Portal
Internet2 is looking for community members with needs that require additional portal capabilities. See the portal demonstration presented at 2012 Spring Internet2 Member Meeting during the Performance Working Group Meeting on Monday, April 23, and at the Internet2 Advanced Network Services session on Wednesday, April 25, 2012. Please communicate your ideas and priorities for new portal features to Jeff Boote.
