Biomedical Informatics

REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a secure, web-based application designed exclusively to support data capture for research studies. The REDCap Consortium is comprised of 200 active institutional partners from CTSA, GCRC, RCMI and other institutions, and it supports two secure, web-based applications (REDCap and REDCap Survey) designed exclusively to support data capture for research studies. The REDCap application is currently in production use or development build-status for more than 7930 studies with over 16,320 end-users spanning numerous research focus areas across the consortium, and the recently released REDCap Survey application is now being adopted rapidly by consortium partners. Both REDCap and REDCap Survey provide: 1) a stream-lined process for rapidly building a database or online survey, respectively; 2) an intuitive interface for collecting data (with data validation); 3) automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to common statistical packages (SPSS, SAS, Stata, R); 4) advanced features, such as branching logic, file uploading, and calculated fields; and 5) a quick and easy software installation process. For more information and videos please enter the REDCap website. If you would like to know how to use this software for your research project, please send us a message.

The goal of the RCMI Collaborative Technologies Activity is to provide the necessary infrastructure and staff to support collaborative research activities between investigators at the Medical Sciences Campus and colleagues in major research centers in the United States and around the world. This activity provides technology support to collaborative projects developed by Medical Sciences Campus faculty in collaboration with faculty at institutions at other locations in and outside Puerto Rico. It will also benefit graduate students and young investigators by facilitating direct interactions with faculty from institutions in the United States and around the world. Services include videoconference suppport; website development, hosting and maintenance; mirror-site hosting; search engine development and management; list servers; webcasting; image processing; webinar support, and video streaming over high-speed networks from research instrumentation. For more information, please enter the project's website .

The Puerto Rico Alliance for the Advancement of Biomedical Research Excellence (PRAABRE) has been instrumental in creating an Island-wide network devoted to genomics and proteomics in Puerto Rico. The bioinformatics core of the PRAABRE will carry out it's mission of enhancing biomedical research in Puerto Rico by providing resources for research, education and training. These resources will work to enhance biomedical research in Puerto Rico by providing researchers with the bioinformatics tools and technical support they require to perform cutting-edge biomedical research; enhance the computational biology research environment in Puerto Rico by establishing research collaborations with biomedical, computational and mathematics researchers; enhance multidisciplinary research by developing new courses and educational materials in computational biology, statistics and bioinformatics in collaboration with research faculty and the Science and Technology Competency Enhancement (STCE) Core; enhance research by promoting advanced networking between PRAABRE member institutions, to enable collaborative research on and off the island; enhance biomedical research by promoting effective access to scientific literature and databases for the biomedical researchers in PRAABRE; enhance biomedical research by enabling effective management of bibliographic information by fostering the use of bibliographic software and applying it to literature searches, articles and references management and manuscript writing.

The High-Performance Computing facility of the University of Puerto Rico provides a technology and service infrastructure for the research and education community of the University including an advanced research network, core high-performance computational resources services, and evaluation of emerging technologies. Particular emphasis is made in offering computational and technical resources supporting the PR-EPSCoR and PR-INBRE research thrust areas. Aside from access to the computational environment present at the HPCf, services offered to the HPC community of the UPR include but are not restricted to the following: network design and security consulting; joint development or adaptation of Internet2 meritorious applications; parallel programming; installation and maintenance of specialized software on the HPCf computers; development of research materials at the Visualization Lab; workshops on visualization, programming and Unix system administration; hosting of workshops for the scientific community using the VisualizationLab/Teaching Lab; maintenance of a web-accessible help-desk and technical documents repository, and purchase and maintenance of specific institutional software licenses, e.g. SGI Varsity, NAG ASLI program.