CCOS Impact Analysis Team

The Impact Analysis Team within the CTSA Coordination, Communication, and Operations Support (CCOS) Center supports the CTSA research consortium by applying data science to identify program benefits, research portfolio scope, trends over time, combined effects across research hubs, and potential collaborations, and to provide data-driven decision support for NCATS administrators.

The group developed an advanced automation tool to enable the application of the Translational Sciences Benefits Model (TSBM) to the broad scope of research outputs across the entire program (152K documents), a task too labor-intensive for manual undertaking. This work, published in Frontiers, supports identification of benefits of the program as a whole and is able to find combined effects even when groups are not directly collaborating.

By expanding data analysis to program-wide results rather than focusing on analysis of individual research hubs, the system presents information that emerges from the documents themselves. It supplements directed searching.

Topic Distribution Across CTSA Organizations

Automation has also enabled the enrichment of data from NIH RePORTER with additional details from publicly available sources such as PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Such enriched information, combined with the automation pipeline, enables not only analysis of research by asking specific questions but also discovery of topics and trends that emerge from the 100K+ documents themselves. Cross-hub results and benefits that are difficult to identify amongst the vast numbers of scientific publications are thus able to be identified and described.

Topic Trends Over Time

From the documents associated with a topic either by user query or automated identification, the group has also developed a system to generate initial stories for human review, accompanied by lists of relevant publications, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents. This assists communication with the consortium and the public, as well as providing decision support for administrators.

Building on these capabilities, the team has developed a semantic search across all of the research document outputs, enabling users to directly investigate program benefits.

The Team:

The CCOS Impact Analysis team comprises expertise in Computational Biology, Data Science, Natural Language Processing, AI, Clinical Data and Informatics, and software, database, and web design.