The data management approach of the CCNMD is a two tiered plan. Tier one, involves the implementationand maintenance of a data warehouse system that has recently been developed within the Department ofPsychiatry center-wide. This system provides access to the contributing projects and cores within theCCNMD system integrated data storage and data query capacity through a secure web-based portal. A 3server computer cluster and a 2 terabyte mass storage system positioned behind the Mount Sinai fire-walland further protected by 128 bit encryption constitutes the physical structure for data management. All of thedata tables generated by the Brian Bank Core and the Clinical Core during the past 22 years have beenintegrated into this browser based data warehouse which now contains over 3100 variables and more than 2million data points. These data sets are available for interrogation and mining to all CCNMD participantsthrough a secure intranet. Also included as part of the electronically available data sets are macro andmicroscopic images of Brain Bank tissues and PDF files of source documents on which the research dataare based. Tier two, involves statistical support for all CCNMD projects and cores. All of the CCNMD projectsrequire considerable statistical data analysis, and because of the complexity of some of the hypothesesaddressed a high level of statistical analytic sophistication. While all of the CCNMD investigators are wellversed in the statistical approaches that are applicable to their specific hypotheses and projects, this core willprovide them with statistical expertise for not only state-of-the-art analysis of their specific data sets, but alsofor the integration of each projects data with the data derived from the other projects. The integration ofcross-project data for statistical analysis will not only be aided by the data management system described,but also by the fact that statistical testing of hypotheses has been an integral part of the development of theaims and hypotheses of each CCNMD project form the time of their inception.
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