A modular informatics platform for effective support of collaborative and multicenter studies in cardiology

Collaborative and multicenter studies permit a large number of patients to be enrolled within a reasonable time and providing the opportunity to collect different data. Informatics platforms play an important role in management, storage, and exchange of data between the participants involved in the study. In this article, we describe a modular informatics platform designed and developed to support collaborative and multicenter studies in cardiology. In each developed module, data management is implemented following local defined protocols. The modular characteristic of the developed platform allows independent transfer of different kinds of data, such as biological samples, imaging raw data, and patients' digital information. Moreover, it offers safe central storage of the data collected during the study. The developed platform was successfully tested during a European collaborative and multicenter study, focused on evaluating multimodal non-invasive imaging to diagnose and characterize ischemic heart disease.