Welcome to the Integrative Transdisciplinary Biospecimen and Pathology Annotation Translational Health (itBioPath) application. This application was developed at the HCI Huntsman Cancer Institute by Research Informatics Shared Resource (RISR). This application allows the Tissue Resource and Applications Core facility (TRAC) to easily track collected specimen, disbursement and pathology information. In addition, other University Hospital or Huntsman Cancer researchers are able to track information on their specimens independent of TRAC. The tool provides not only consistent data tracking for each specimen, but it allows TRAC to share this information among its supported researchers by providing them with the same tool to use. The security model utilized by the application supports extensive configuration of user access to specimen information, under the control of the protocol administrator.

This document covers the steps necessary to use various features of the application. Certain decisions about how data is formatted, or other procedural concerns are controlled by TRAC and the various labs that use itBioPath. Office policy will determine the answers to those questions. Your supervisor will be able to help you in that regard. The itBioPath database centers primarily around specimen records, however these are not the only kinds of records found in the database. Individual specimens are linked to Collection event records. Collection event records represent all of the specimens collected at the same time. The date of collection and treatment information will be applicable to all specimens from the same collection event.

A patient may have specimens collected on multiple occasions. These collection records and their associated specimens are also linked to Patient records that contain information about the patient. Patient information will apply to all specimens collected from that patient, regardless of the date of collection. For example, such patient information includes the patient's name and demographic information.

It is important to understand the relationships of itBioPath's data structure. Specimens are the core itBioPath's database. All individual specimen records are associated to a Collection and a Patient. Specimens, Collections, and Patients all have separate windows for entering or editing data. There can be multiple specimens associated to a single collection. When editing Collection information, the changes will be applied to all specimens associated to the updated Collection. Similarly, when editing Patient information, the changes will be applied to all Collections and Specimens associated to the updated Patient.

There are other types of records to be found in itBioPath, such as diagnosis or patient consent records. These records function more as subrecords within the basic overall structure. These records are usually accessed from a patient, collection or specimen record window. The graphic above shows a simplified visual interpretation of how the database stores information.