Screen4Care Metadata Repository

Abstract

Screen4Care (S4C) is an IMI2 project which seeks to shorten the path to diagnosis for patients with rare disease by providing a digital federated infrastructure in particular by providing a federated metadata repository (MDR). Findability and interoperability of existing data is a common roadblock in machine learning with health data and particularly crucial in the case of rare disease with low incidence numbers. Therefore, the MDR, which only stores descriptive metadata of registered data sources and will allow to discover potential data sources, evaluate their compatibility, estimate the number of matching instances and thus enable and faciality the match-making in complex machine learning tasks. The analysis, design, and further development of the MDR are based on a wide-ranging review of existing MDRs in the medical domain and their implementation approaches. The MDR was established on ISO/IEC 11179-3, an internationally accepted implementation standard to ensure interoperability and readability. The implementation follows a so-called middle-out strategy, in which we start with limited use-cases for filling the repository and gradually abstract and extend the content to more generalized cases. In addition, a seamless user interface is provided to allow researchers to interact with the MDR efficiently.