SciCloud 2015: Big Data and Health’, the 3rd edition of the 'Cloud Annual Scientific Conference', organized by Mind the Byte in collaboration with PCB and Biocat, and the support of Bellavista, will be held on 14 April at the Parc Cientific Barcelona (PCB) . The forum will bring together leading experts from the academic, scientific, healthcare, business and government fields who will discuss the concept of  biomedical Big Data and share interesting initiatives, success stories and different possibilities of using large volumes of data in health sciences.

The opening of the event will be led by Jordi Quintana, Business Development Advisor of the PCB, and Alfons Nonell-Canals, founder and CEO of Mind the Byte.

We are currently living in the era of Big Data in which different technologies produce thousands of data terabytes every minute. The real value of these data lies in the information that can be extracted, not only in its creation. In health sciences, this information is especially important to improve emerging disciplines such as personalized medicine or science ‘omics’ (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.)-,  create new classifications of diseases or develop advanced and technologies including environmental intelligence, home telecare and monitoring of drug treatments for dependent persons.

“As organizers of this conference, we intent to provide an overview of the importance of Big Data in the day to day and how, in the case of health, it can help us have a more sustainable health care system and more optimized and efficient treatments. From the interpretation of ECG signals to the decision of a specific treatment according to the patient’s genetic markers, the possibility to analyze these huge amounts of data, extract the important information and perform real-time decision-making are based on a completely new set of algorithms and techniques. Providing health professionals with useful knowledge relating to the management and analysis of these massive data could guide the process of allocation of health resources and provide medical professionals with intelligent tools for therapy design, planning and monitoring” Nonell-Canals says.

Exploring the potential of Big Data

The first session of the conference will feature the participation of Guillem Serra, responsible for Health and Pharma Market at Barcelona Digital (BDigital), a technology reference center in R&D+i of  innovative ICT products and services for multiple sectors, and Karma Peiró, journalist specialized in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), a  pioneer and expert in data journalism and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Spain (OKFN Spain).

Serra will explain to the attendees the concept of Big Data and will present several projects in the field of artificial intelligence and telecare with the aim to provide more physical and social autonomy to the elderly or disabled people. These last-generation technologies control the domestic setting with automated sensors that monitor both the daily habits of a person (sleeping hours, activity, number of times one goes to the toilet, etc.) as well as alerts (gas, smoke, etc.). Data are sent to a cloud platform where they are processed in real time and shown in an understandable fashion to professional caregivers and family members.

Karma Peiró will discuss the different strategies to process, analyze and act on the information provided at the right time, as a competitive advantage of Big Data in any profession, and will offer an interactive, eminently practical workshop where participants will become familiar with computing tools that allow the generation of value through the processing of massive data flows. Participants will also acquire skills for their visualization and good practices.

Challenges and opportunities towards P4 medicine

The second session will consist of a round table where the challenges and Big Data applications towards P4 medicine (personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory) will be discussed and initiatives and success stories in this area will be presented. The session will be moderated by Xavier Testar, delegate to the Rector for Innovation Strategic Actions of the Barcelona University (UB) and deputy director of the Barcelona Entrepreneurship Institute (BIE) and vice president of the Spanish Association of Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology (AEEC).

Josep M. Argimon, director of the Catalan Agency for Health Information, Assessment and Quality (AQuAS) will explain the VISC+ project that will provide health information of the health system of Catalonia to research centers and other stakeholders to improve research and assessment both at a national and international level. Based on this initiative –based on the management of massive data (Big Data) generated by the Catalan health system and commitment to open data (Open Data)- Argimon will address important  issues relating to security, privacy and ethics.

Alexandre Perera, professor at the Automatic Control Department of the Polytechnic University of Barcelona and researcher at the  Biomedical Engineering Research Centre (CREB) will discuss an innovative software that improves biomarker analysis and decreases the prediction error or metabolomic analysis tests (in which small organic molecules of biological systems, such as hormones are studied). Making predictions in this area is complex because it requires analyzing numerous and scattered data from individual samples, though it is of great importance for assessing, for example, the effectiveness of new drugs.

Finally, the event will host a presentation by Arcadi Navarro, ICREA professor, director of the Department of Experimental Health Sciences, at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and head of the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA), a project led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the Center for Genomic Regulation. The EGA contains the results of over 800 studies and 1,000,000 gigabytes of information generated from the study of the DNA of patients worldwide. Based on his experience, Navarro will explain the role that human genomic data registries have in the scientific community and how these data are managed to advance the understanding, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of many diseases.

The congress will be closed by Enric Canela, vice-rector for Science Policy at the UB  and director of the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry of the Faculty of Biology at the UB.