Pan-European Data Harmonization for Biobanks in ADOPT BBMRI-ERIC

Background High-quality clinical data and biological specimens are key for medical research and personalized medicine. The Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure-European Research Infrastructure Consortium (BBMRI-ERIC) aims to facilitate access to such biological resources. The accompanying ADOPT BBMRI-ERIC project kick-started BBMRI-ERIC by collecting colorectal cancer data from European biobanks. Objectives To transform these data into a common representation, a uniform approach for data integration and harmonization had to be developed. This article describes the design and the implementation of a toolset for this task. Methods Based on the semantics of a metadata repository, we developed a lexical bag-of-words matcher, capable of semiautomatically mapping local biobank terms to the central ADOPT BBMRI-ERIC terminology. Its algorithm supports fuzzy matching, utilization of synonyms, and sentiment tagging. To process the anonymized instance data based on these mappings, we also developed a data transformation application. Results The implementation was used to process the data from 10 European biobanks. The lexical matcher automatically and correctly mapped 78.48% of the 1,492 local biobank terms, and human experts were able to complete the remaining mappings. We used the expert-curated mappings to successfully process 147,608 data records from 3,415 patients. Conclusion A generic harmonization approach was created and successfully used for cross-institutional data harmonization across 10 European biobanks. The software tools were made available as open source.