Master of Science Jo Inge Arnes will Thursday January 18th, 2024, at 12:15 hold his disputas for the PhD degree in Science. The title of his thesis is:
"Toward a Collaborative Platform for Hybrid Designs Sharing a Common Cohort"
Population-based prospective cohort studies typically recruit a relatively large group of participants representative of a studied population and follow them over years or decades. This group of participants is called a cohort. As part of the study, the participants may be asked to answer extensive questionnaires, undergo medical examinations, donate blood samples, and participate in several rounds of follow-ups. The collected data can also include information from other sources, such as health registers. In prospective cohort studies, the participants initially do not have the investigated diagnoses, but statistically, a certain percentage will be diagnosed with a disease yearly. The studies enable the researchers to investigate how those who got a disease differ from those who did not. Often, many new studies can be nested within a cohort study. Data for a subgroup of the cohort is then selected and analyzed. A new study combined with an existing cohort is said to have a hybrid design.
When a research group uses the same cohort as a basis for multiple new studies, these studies often have similarities regarding the workflow for designing the study and analysis. The thesis shows the potential for developing a platform encouraging the reuse of work from previous studies and systematizing the study design workflows to enhance time efficiency and reduce the risk of errors.
However, the study data are subject to strict acts and regulations pertaining to privacy and research ethics. Therefore, the data must be stored and accessed within a secured IT environment where researchers log in to conduct analyses, with minimal possibilities to install analytics software not already provided by default. Further, transferring the data from the secured IT environment to a local computer or a public cloud is prohibited. Nevertheless, researchers can usually upload and run script files, e.g., written in R and run in R-studio. A consequence is that researchers - often having limited software engineering skills - may rely mainly on self-written code for their analyses, possibly unsystematically developed with a high risk of errors and reinventing solutions solved in preceding studies within the group.
Evaluation committee:
The disputas will be led by Professor Hilje Huru, Vice Dean of Education at the Faculty of Science and Technology, UiT.
Supervisors:
Streaming site: