Current Focus

The focus of the John’s Hopkins All Children’s (JHAC) Center in Pediatric Data Science and Analytic Methodology (PDSAM) is to develop, investigate, disseminate, apply, and educate other researchers and trainees on novel approaches in healthcare data science and new analytic methodologies. Additionally, the center guides the development of technological infrastructure for both software and hardware in collaboration with industry and other premier academic centers to analyze large amounts of data that includes physiological data from bedside monitors, and consumer health tracking devices, electronic medical records, national and international registries.

Methods development, investigation, and application efforts will target intramural and extramural grant funding mechanisms. Education and training of clinical/translational researchers and the next generation of data scientists will include didactic lectures, seminars/symposia, and workshops, developed in collaboration with the JHAC Center for Children’s Clinical and Translational Research Education, Training, and Engagement.

Areas of methodological emphasis in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, based upon current investigator expertise, include: survey design methodology; latent variable modeling; modeling and analysis of intensive longitudinal data; and imputation of missing data. In addition, leveraging current investigator expertise, areas of methodological emphasis in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence include: natural language processing; signal processing; recommender/classification systems; data visualization; and deep learning. 

Future Potential

The future potential of the Center may include relevant JHU faculty appointments for Program co-directors, and the co-development of a practicum experience and/or lectures within relevant JHU Master’s programs (e.g., Master’s program in Health Sciences Informatics) that are led by these center-based faculty.

The center will establish close collaborations with clinicians, researchers and industry partners to co-develop and validate algorithms to advance pediatric data science, and help train and test models with the potential for future commercialization. Further, the center will help to design novel and transformative ideas that will benefit the medical and healthcare data science fields by leveraging PDSAM’s data and investigator's knowledge.

Further prospects for the Center also include partnering with the JHAC Data Coordinating Center for Pediatric Multicenter Studies to implement the innovative and peer-reviewed methods developed by the former, into the activities of the latter, resulting in further adoption of those methods in the field of pediatrics, and their further representation in the applied pediatric literature across diverse clinical disciplines and therapeutic areas.

With regard to broadened scope of education and training initiatives, advanced curricula in future years will include content on assessing the validity of algorithmic inferences, fairness of algorithmic decisions, causality, and reproducibility. With regard to broadened scope of methodological innovation, future years will include the development, investigation, publication, and application of new biomedical and bioinformatics methods in computational biology (e.g., in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and/or lipidomics), leveraging the expertise of newly recruited bioinformatics faculty and targeting additional grant funding sources from among these areas.

Lastly, the center will partner with the Epidemiology/Biostatistics Unit, Predictive Analytics Core, and Bioinformatics Unit of the JHAC Health Informatics Core to provide consultative services to pediatric clinical/translational investigators and basic scientists, based on the Core’s identification of unique project needs for the development or application of novel methodologies.