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Taiwan's Trustworthy Cloud Platform Boosts Precision Medicine, Saves Healthcare Funds

From Liberty Times · () Chinese

Translated from Chinese, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

News Named sources New plan
  • Taiwan's National High-Speed Computing Center developed a "Trustworthy Data Cloud Analysis Platform" to advance precision medicine and healthcare.
  • The platform de-identifies medical data for research, enabling studies on cancer, rare diseases, and genetics.
  • Eleven medical centers have joined the initiative, which aims to improve disease diagnosis, drug development, and reduce healthcare costs.

Taiwan's National High-Speed Computing Center has developed a "Trustworthy Data Cloud Analysis Platform" to facilitate the advancement of precision medicine and healthcare. This platform is designed to de-identify large volumes of medical data, such as patient histories and genetic information, before high-speed computing analysis. The goal is to enable researchers to derive scientific findings without compromising patient privacy.

Currently, eleven medical centers in Taiwan have partnered with the initiative, contributing data from nearly thousands of patients. Research topics include cancer, lupus erythematosus, atrial fibrillation, kidney disease, and stroke. The platform aims to standardize medical record formats and information systems across institutions, removing high-risk personal data during the research phase.

Trustworthy research environment (TRE) is the key in the development process.

— Lin Yan-renLin Yan-ren, head of the Big Data Service Platform Group at the National High-Speed Computing Center, explaining the importance of data security in medical research.

This initiative is crucial for leveraging the growing volume of biomedical big data. The platform addresses the significant storage and computational demands of medical research, with single-patient data potentially reaching 200GB and research on 100 individuals requiring terabytes of data. By providing robust storage and high-speed computing capabilities, the center aims to alleviate financial and technical burdens for researchers.

Examples of potential benefits include accelerating disease diagnosis and drug development, as seen in international projects like the U.S. Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The platform's development is part of an eight-year, approximately NT$350 million (US$11 million) project. The center also hopes to integrate with the National Health Insurance database in the future to create a more comprehensive dataset for Taiwanese populations.

The hospital data is protected and not leaked in the TRE environment, and researchers obtain big data analysis results, which can promote the development of precision medicine.

— Lin Yan-renLin Yan-ren describing the benefits of the Trustworthy Data Cloud Analysis Platform.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Liberty Times in Chinese. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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