ORGIDS: Open data portal with more than a decade of ophthalmic data

The Rotterdam Ophthalmic Institute (R.O.I.) launches ORGIDS (http://orgids.com), an open data portal containing data from clinical glaucoma research that was acquired during more than a decade. Commonly, when ophthalmologists and scientists start a new clinical study to get a better insight into diseases such as glaucoma, a large amount of resources is spent on getting data from patients which is then analyzed. The R.O.I. now makes data that was collected in collaboration with the Rotterdam Eye Hospital and its ophthalmologists available through its new portal. Other researchers can freely access this data. This will aid in improving cost-effectiveness of clinical research and enables analysis of clinical data by research groups without ties to a clinic.

A substantial part of the costs associated with clinical research are related to performing patient measurements. Typically, other researchers do not have access to this data and need to spend valuable resources on assembling similar data. In addition, many research groups with a focus on technical fields such as statistics or pattern recognition are not affiliated with a hospital. Without access to this data, they cannot contribute to improving clinical care.

The Rotterdam Ophthalmic Institute, which is affiliated with the Rotterdam Eye Hospital, coordinates a large number of studies that involve acquisition of patient data. To facilitate more efficient research and faster innovation, Koen Vermeer, PhD, senior scientist at the R.O.I., initiated a pilot for an open data portal (called Open Rotterdam Glaucoma Imaging Data Sets, or ORGIDS). This portal, which may now be found at http://orgids.com, currently hosts a large data set of visual fields of glaucoma patients. It contains biannual visual field measurements of both eyes of 139 glaucoma patients over more than a decade. More data sets will be added in the future.

By making the data freely available to other researchers and thereby reducing the need to spend resources on gathering clinical data, the R.O.I. aims to improve the cost-effectiveness of ophthalmic research. In addition, it enables other researchers to apply their advanced analyses to real-life patient data, speeding up the adaptation of these analyses in clinical care.

Setting up ORGIDS was financially supported by Stichting Glaucoomfonds.

For more information, please contact dr. Koen Vermeer (k.vermeer@eyehospital.nl).

The Rotterdam Ophthalmic Institute is an expert centre aimed at supporting and implementing scientific ophthalmic research, and is associated with the Rotterdam Eye Hospital. The research is conducted in close cooperation with ophthalmologists at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital.

Rotterdam Ophthalmic Institute
P.O. Box 70030
3000 LM Rotterdam
+31-104023449
roi@eyehospital.nl

This release was published on openPR.