“The Department of Defense has the world’s largest collection of pathology specimens, including “invaluable” data from the 1918 influenza pandemic. Now it wants help to digitize it.”
“Digitizing the collection of more than a hundred years of data —in the form of 55 million glass slides, 31 million paraffin-embedded tissue blocks and 500,000 wet tissue samples — would create a potentially exquisite machine learning database for computers to gain broader understanding of global health issues.”
“The “complete digitization” of all those objects would be a major lift, with digital images and barcodes containing information for every sample. A new sources sought notice is looking for companies up to the task. The Defense Digital Services (DDS) and the Defense Health Agency‘s Joint Pathology Center (JPC), the entity that oversees the repository database, are spearheading the project…”
“Beyond physically scanning and labeling the millions of samples, the digital modernization project would need to allow the JPC continue to support consulting services and open research conducted by other government agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and its massive health care system.”
“The type of access the digital project would need to grant is called “hub-and-spoke,” meaning medical facilities will be able to access a single “hub” cloud storing the data…” Read the full article here.
Source: DOD needs some help digitizing a massive collection of respiratory disease samples – By Jackson Barnett, August 3, 2020. FedScoop.
