Integration, reuse and sharing of data on voice disorders

This paper describes a set of software tools which facilitate the automated processing of clinical voice (laryngeal) evaluation results, thus assisting doctors in voice disorder diagnostics, treatment and related research. The software tools include a website and a number of client/server applications developed by the authors at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) for patient voice data entry, storage, retrieval, reporting, reuse and sharing on the web in de-identified form. The website software is integrated with existing commercial clinical software to support multi-institutional research collaboration. Design of the client/server applications includes automatic reuse of standard MGH outpatient and surgical schedules. An additional application has been developed to facilitate the remote retrieval and review of recorded clinical endoscopic examinations based on the reuse of commercial viewer software and database. A new general model is suggested for web-based sharing and mining of research data processed by means of a specific desktop computer program.