Improving the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank
Paul, D., Henskens, F. A. and Bridge, J. “Improving the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank”, eResearch Australasia (eRes2013), 2013.
Abstract
The Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank (ASRB) is a long-running eResearch project that collects, manages, and provides mediated access to a large set of data in order to facilitate schizophrenia research. This includes the collation of clinical interviews, brain scans, and blood samples, and the keeping of a registry of participants interested in further research, including both people with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Since its inception in 2005, the ASRB has collected data from approximately 2000 participants, and has supported over 65 research projects. As with any large endeavour, the needs of the ASRB have changed over time. In order to ensure the ASRB software systems continue to meet these changing needs, the project has undergone continual development, involving phases of both in-house and external software engineering. This presentation provides a case study describing how modifications and improvements to the ASRB software system have been implemented, and includes lessons learned which may be useful for similarly scaled projects.
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