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Modern biomedical research is inherently multi-leveled and multidisciplinary.
To facilitate this research, core facilities bring the latest imaging and scanning technologies to
the research community and support many projects simultaneously.
However, they are sometimes doing so in the midst
of significant information management challenges
unforeseen at their inception.
Scientifically, a core facility must be able to manage experimental workflow
and the corresponding large and complex scientific data and to provide support for
data interpretation and analysis.
Administratively, a core facility must be able to manage the scheduling of their equipments
and disseminate experimental data to relevant investigators in a secure and expedient manner that facilitate collaboration.
Financially, a core facility must be able to maintain a flexible and effective billing system to track material,
resource, and personnel costs and bill for services in order to sustain its operation.
It must also have the ability to regularly track the usage of their equipments
and provide summary statistics on resources spent on different categories of research.
To address the informatics challenges,
Professor Zhang's group has been developing a comprehensive system called MIMI
(Multi-modality, Multi-resource, Information Integration environment)
that integrates the administrative,
business and (part of the) scientific support of a core facility
in a single web-based system.
As a result of synergistic collaboration with
faculty members
from the Medical School,
instances of MIMI have been deployed at:
For more information see:
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