UMB ICTR

The ICTR has partnered with informatics experts across campus to form the ICTR Informatics Core to offer all UMB campus faculty access up to 25 hours of free* services to assist the research team in developing REDCap and Qualtrics data capture tools/database and data management as well as access to health care information, such as Epic. 

*Additional hours require review and approval from ICTR leadership.

The REDCap team can help build a database for your project in REDCap.  Please be prepared to provide your current, IRB-approved research surveys, data entry /case report forms, and your project's data collection schedule.  See Data Management for sample forms .  Data collected are stored and maintained locally on campus in a firewalled server managed by the UMB Clinical and Translational Research Informatics Center (CTRIC). REDCap provides automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to Excel, PDF, and common statistical packages (SPSS, SAS, Stata, R) as well as a built-in project calendar, a scheduling module, ad hoc reporting tools, and advanced features, such as auto-validation, branching logic, file uploading, calculated fields, and survey stop actions.  REDCap can be set up for multi-center studies as well. If you need a simple Q&A survey, consider Qualtrics. For electronic data capture forms, consider OpenText TeleForm

Access to Clinical Data. The Research HARBOR Data Warehouse consists of clinical and investigational data collected from a variety of data sources from UMMS, Translational Genomics Lab (TGL), iPatient, and other schools/entities across campus. Currently, the main data source is the Clinical Data Repository (CDR), which contains data from UMMC and other UMMS clinical sites. These data have been collated and are maintained as a library to allow researchers to request a broad scope of clinical, scientific, utilization, financial, and resource availability information. Additional data sources will become available within the Research HARBOR over time.  IRB approval/determination letter must be provided prior to initiating scope of work.

REDCap Template language related to data privacy, confidentiality, security, and core description

Quality Assurance/Control. The UMB Clinical and Translational Research Informatics Center (CTRIC) can design a quality assurance plan specific to your study database and run regular reports to indicate improbable and impossible values in your database.

Consultation on: 

• Use of eHealth/mHealth/patient portal interventions to promote and manage the health of adults age 50 and older
• Patient-centered PHR/patient portal implementation
• Web-based research and usability testing
• Hospital information systems evaluation and implementation

Consultation to determine "best fit" of proprosed project and available databases

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County brings expertise in two main areas to the UMB ICTR: Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. These two areas are often interdependent, with data-driven methods applied to problems in cybersecurity, and work on securing AI and ML systems against data-oriented attacks. Faculty at UMBC also have significant experience in application domains relevant to the UMB ICTR, such as medical imaging, diagnosis from temporal data such as EEG and vital signs, and embedded device security.

UMBC - ICTR Core Capabilities

• Securing medical devices
• Securing smart systems, e.g., smart surgery rooms
• Protecting learned/predictive models from attacks
• Deep learning and artificial neural networks
• Natural language processing
• Graph analytics
• Time series analytics
• Data visualization augmented reality and virtual reality

UMBC - ICTR Core Example of Services:

• Consult to uncover possible cybersecurity risks associated with devices and/or systems.
• Consult on ways to protect devices and/or systems from attackers, either at design time or after deployment.
• Consult on ways to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve specific problems given existing data, including processing pipelines, specific algorithms, and evaluation methodology
• Advise on what additional data could be collected or obtained to potentially improve the utility of AI/ML for specific use cases.
• Construct simple proof-of-concept AI/ML systems to understand what level of performance might be achieved with more time, data, or resources
• Advise on the best visual representations to explore complex datasets and to communicate results to others.

UMB faculty needing the UMB Core services below may be eligible for additional support through the ICTR Voucher (micro grant) Program.