“The Defense Innovation Board made recommendations to digitize the Defense Health Agency’s Joint Pathology Center samples and maximize sample data use in combatting diseases — from cancer to COVID-19 — at a meeting Thursday.”
“The center is the largest collection of human pathological tissue specimens in the world, with over 55 million glass pathology slides, 31 million paraffin-embedded tissue blocks and 500,000 wet tissue samples, collected over the past 100 years.”
“With that volume of information, DIB Member Michael McQuade said that digitizing the sample data can help researchers overcome barriers in accessing meaningful amounts of data to find solutions to diseases — even the COVID-19 coronavirus, McQuade added.”
“’If we have access to that data, the medical community is better able to identify and understand current and future disease,’ McQuade said. ‘It enables the global community to better respond to future global health crises, and it promotes a better sense of health and wellbeing both in the DOD and in the federal population, so we see this as an amazing valuable resource, and then coupled with artificial intelligence, machine learning, things that the DIB has talked about for a very long time, only serves to amplify the value of that repository.’”
“Given the potential that researchers could reap from effectively archived JPC data, the board made a series of recommendations, including an initial multi-step pilot phase that will take place over the course of 12 months after the recommendations are adopted and a suggested long-term plan for DOD…” Read the full article here.
Source: DIB’s Recommendations for Digitization Can Help Tackle Diseases Like Coronavirus – By Melissa Harris, March 6, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
