Title:	CLINMALDB: A CLINICAL FIELD-RESEARCH ORIENTED RELATIONAL DATABASE TO STUDY HUMAN MALARIA
Author(s):	Márcio K. Oikawa , Emilio F. Merino , Carmen Fernandez-becerra , Gerhard Wunderlich , Juan M. Villalobos , Pedro P. S. B. Silva , Junior Barrera , Alan M. Durham , Hernando A. Del Portillo , João E. F
ISBN:	978-972-8924-81-2
Editors:	Mário Macedo
Year:	2009
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Clinical malaria database, database integration, clinical data warehouse
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	3
Last Page:	10
Language:	English
Cover:
Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Clinical data of malaria patients in endemic regions is presently stored in vastly different ways depending on local policy, expertise and available equipment. There is a multitude of written questionnaires on which different parameters are recorded associated to arbitrary identification codes assigned by health workers. This wealth of information is later stored into physical archives or converted into computer files such as text documents, excel tables or single-table Microsoft Access databases. As a result the potential to relate all this information is not properly fulfilled, reducing the number of ways in which it can be searched. ClinMalDB (http://clinmaldb.usp.br) is a clinical field-research oriented relational database to study human malaria. It provides a platform for storing and manipulating clinical data of malaria patients and information of parasites obtained from them. ClinMalDB was developed using a modularization approach consisting of four levels with different purposes. The first level is responsible for primary data storage; the second one is composed of integration routines for the databases inside the first level; level three has cube views; and level four houses all components responsible for user data retrieval including components for data visualization, data entry, and data export. ClinMalDB also offers an automatic sequence quality assessment tool of alleles from parasite virulent genes and includes a search service to relate parasite gene sequences to clinical data. The current release includes the complete technical description of the database, the parameters used to evaluate clinical data for malaria patients, a pre-annotation sequence analysis pipeline service of parasite vir, var, stevor and rif genes, cube views of the current database and an interactive page to illustrate sequence search based on clinical data. The general architecture and modular structure of ClinMaldb and its associated tools are illustrated with data obtained from human malaria patients. ClinMaldb's SQL definition and supporting software is open source and can be freely downloadable from http://clinmaldb.usp.br. ClinMalDB thus represents a new valuable resource facilitating the storage and analysis of data from human malaria patients.
	Go Back