Blogs

Twenty million people in the USA and 75 million people worldwide have tested positive for COVID-19. Public health estimates that six times more people have had the disease and are not aware. A vaccine will slow the rate of growth, but no one is expecting it to eradicate the virus as it mutates and adapts.

Crowd-sourced Challenge initiatives in biomedical research provide a mechanism for transparent and rigorous performance assessment. The core idea of these studies is simple. A group of researchers, typically called the “organizers”, identify a key problem that has a diversity of potential solutions. These solutions are typically computational, meaning that each is a different algorithm or method. The organizers then identify or create a suitable benchmarking dataset and a metric of accuracy.

Making research data broadly findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable is essential to advancing science and accelerating its translation into knowledge and innovation. The global response to COVID-19 highlights the importance and benefits of sharing research data more openly.

OHSU researchers studying COVID-19 are encouraged to access data from the records of more than 50,000 coronavirus-positive patients that are part of the new National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) data platform.