A perspective for biomedical data integration: Design of databases for flow cytometry

Background: The integration of biomedical information is essential for tackling medical problems. We describe a data model in the domain of flow cytometry (FC) allowing for massive management, analysis and integration with other laboratory and clinical information. The paper is concerned with the proper translation of the Flow Cytometry Standard (FCS) into a relational database schema, in a way that facilitates end users at either doing research on FC or studying specific cases of patients undergone FC analysis Results: The proposed database schema provides integration of data originating from diverse acquisition settings, organized in a way that allows syntactically simple queries that provide results significantly faster than the conventional implementations of the FCS standard. The proposed schema can potentially achieve up to 8 orders of magnitude reduction in query complexity and up to 2 orders of magnitude reduction in response time for data originating from flow cytometers that...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: John Drakos, Marina Karakantza, Nicholas C. Zoumbos, John Lakoumentas, George Nikiforidis, George Sakellaropoulos
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Database Schema, Flow Cytometry, Magnitude Reduction