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caTissue For Blood Lab

Interface:
caTissue interface allows for dynamic (on the fly) creation of additional attributes (both

interface elements and data elements). This feature (available in March 2008) provides the

ability to extend predefined attributes that come with caTissue. This adds significant flexibility

by allowing one to add additional attributes without the need for writing or modifying

existing codebase. One limitation is that only attributes can be extended in this fashion and not

objects. A further limitation of the interface is that it does not provide the ability for batch

insertion of data.

Software Extension:
caTissue is n-tiered with significant complexity. It only handles tracking of biospecimens

and the software would need to be extended to incorporate the blood lab processes - Labcode,

Pulling and Sorting. The software is flexible and extensions would require knowledge and

experience using several Java frameworks and database design.

Data Migration:
Data migration from legacy systems into a caTissue staging database can be

accomplished by using SQL. Persistent provides a tool for migrating from the staging database

into a production database. This tool would apply data validations and report any errors. The

second step is an iterative step and the number of iterations would depend on how clean the data

is or how much cleaning one would like to do before the data is migrated.

Author: Rakesh Kukatla Created: 06/08/2007 Page: 1 Updated: 06/12/2007 By: Rakesh K
Systems:
caTissue production release is about 2 months old now. In the production environment

many minor bugs have been discovered although none have resulted in a system outage or

downtime. The main deployment site (Washington University) has about 100,000 specimens

that are being tracked by caTissue. There is no site yet tracking a million or more specimens

with caTissue. Scalability and performance issues if any would be discovered as and when

caTissue is deployed at this scale. Persistent Systems representative advises to wait until the

next release of caTissue in March 2008 for the approximately 3-4 million specimens and 25-35

million transactions we need to track. caTissue is an open web based system and uses an

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) without an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or

Transport Layer Security (TLS) mechanisms. Authentication and Authorization is managed by

CSM (Common Security Module developed by EkagraSoft for NCI). Some changes would need

to be made at our end to integrate Authentication into Channing (Capecod) or HSPH (Harvard

PIN/XID system). Fine grain control of Authorization is not available at this time. For example,

a user cannot be granted authorization to view/edit only a subset of the data (participants

belonging only to NHS or HPFS). Persistent Systems representative also mentioned that system

performance takes a significant hit with certain configurations of CSM.

Key Judgements:
Although not yet fully mature caTissue has good potential. caTissue was created

specifically to address academic research needs and is practically free.

Author: Rakesh Kukatla Created: 06/08/2007 Page: 2 Updated: 06/12/2007 By: Rakesh K

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