Software Tools

The Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP®) SCZ program uses a complex ecosystem of software tools for data capture, management, processing, and analysis. The project relies on a number of well-established data capture systems (e.g., REDCap, XNAT) and cutting-edge tools for ecological momentary assessment such as MINDLamp.

One key component of our efforts is to establish a continuous automated data flow that provides near real-time access to data quality metrics via a study monitoring dashboard. We are actively developing Lochness, a data aggregation tool, to pull raw data from all electronic capture systems into a common data lake. Key features for each data type are then extracted using customizable processing pipelines and made available for visualization on a study dashboard powered by DPDash. Both DPDash and Lochness originate from the Neuroinformatics Research Group at Harvard University, and are being further developed for this project.

Data will be shared on the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Data Archive (NDA) for download and further analysis. We will facilitate these analyses via a Data Exploration and Analysis Portal (DEAP) housed in the cloud computing infrastructure of the NDA. The AMP SCZ program DEAP tool will be a customization of the popular DEAP tool available for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.

We are committed to open science principles and are hosting all source code in open source repositories on github. We will also follow and contribute to open data standards such as the Brain Imaging Data Structure Standard (BIDS).