The 2023 Winter Internship at CCADD has begun. For this year’s internship, CCADD has Jaeho Hyun, who will study and experience the on-going research projects at CCADD.

Jaeho Hyun is a senior in biomedical engineering at Korea University. He studied mechanical system design engineering at Hongik University until the second year in college before he transferred to Korea University starting his junior year. His motivation for transfer was his interest in finding engineering solutions to solve problems in the medical field. Prior to this internship, he studied artificial intelligence (AI) technology in Seoul Information and communication technology (ICT) innovation square in the summer 2022. The program deepened his interest in applying technical knowledge to addressing real world problems pertaining to healthcare and medicine. During the internship at CCADD, he intends to expand his knowledge and explore various applications of real-world data analysis and AI technology in drug development sciences.

Yesol Hong won the Excellent Research Award at the 30th Annual Conference of the Korean Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (KSCPT), December 1-3, 2022, held at Bexco, Busan, South Korea. The title of YeSol's presentation was "One-year follow-up of patients with COVID-19: Analysis of new-onset disease after COVID-19 diagnosis using Real-World Data". She discussed the results of an analysis of the occurrence of disease in patients with COVID-19 over a year using two different real-world data sets. One of her analysis results was a nation-wide study, which was significant in that it included the largest number of study subjects among the studies analyzing the post-COVID-19-condition in Korea. Jung Hyun Won equally contributed to this study with Professor Howard Lee serving as the principal investigator.

Additionally, Siun Kim, Yoona Choi, David Seung U Lee also presented their research through poster exhibition at the conference. 

Full presentations can be watched at the following YouTube links: 

YeSol had the honor to deliver oral presentation and won the Excellent Research Award at 2022 fall conference hosted by the Korean Society of Medical Informatics(KOSMI). YeSol has presented her work entitled "Effectiveness and safety of sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors(SGLT2i) added to mono, dual or triple treatment in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus(T2DM)". She discussed the additive efficacy in glycemic control and the tolerability of SGLT2i in T2DM patients when combined with other antihyperglycemic agents, such as metformin, sulfonylureas, and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors using real-world data. Yoona Choi, TaeKyu Chung, and Yoomin Jeon also contributed to this study as co-researchers, with Professor Howard Lee serving as the principle investigator.

The conference was a three-day event (from Nov 23rd, 2022 to Nov 25th, 2022) and was held at The International Convention Center, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Jeonbuk, South Korea. This conference, the host(KOSMI) organized the event around the theme, "The Power and Value of Healthcare Data Linkage". The conference was full of enlightening speeches that reflected the progress made in the field of medical informatics. With a total of 1,039 participants, this conference was held on the largest scale ever among KOSMI conferences. 

Effective September 1, 2021, Siun Kim will serve as the new lab chief for CCADD. Yoomin Jeon, the former lab chief, stepped down and will continue to be working as a regular member of CCADD. Siun, as the new lab chief, commented, "I feel great honor, privilege, and responsibility to take on this important role." 

Prof. Howard Lee thanked Yoomin for her faithful service since March, 2019. Under Yoomin's leadership, CCADD has been able to evolve to a well-functioning organization. Yoomin also has been spearheading to bring new research funds to CCADD, which is the single most important accomplishment that has made CCADD self-sustaining financially. Not only that, Yoomin has played an indispensable role in expanding the research fields of CCADD, including artificial intelligence-guided clinical trail feasibility assessment and real-world data analytics. 

CCADD wished the best of luck for both Siun and Yoomin. Well done, Yoomin! Welcome, Siun!

The 2019 Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Korea International Symposium was held on December 12-14 at Konjiam Resort, Korea. The symposium gathered nearly 400 participants from nine different countries, clearly showing a growing interest in the OHDSI community. The main session on the second day was followed by full-day tutorial workshops on the first day. The main session began with a warm welcome by Prof. Rong Min Baek, the Chairman of the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Seoul National University College of Medicine, followed by an overview of the Korean OHDSI journey by Prof. Rae Woong Park, the Director and Professor at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ajou University School of Medicine. Other topics in the main session included an introduction to the European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN) project, the OHDSI Initiative, and the FeederNet platform. The key message from all these presentations was on generating reproducible and reliable evidence from the existing clinical data standardized by the OHDSI common data model (CDM).  

Among three parallel sessions, 'Clinical trials in OHDSI' session was newly introduced this year. This parallel session purely focused on clinical trials, which consisted of the following three invited talks: 'Introduction to clinical trials', 'Smart User-friendly CDM-based Clinical trial dEsign Support System, SUCCESS', and 'OHDSI use case: clinical trial feasibility'. Charles Joochul Lee, a general manager of Selvas AI Inc., and Ms. Yoomin Jeon were invited to give a talk on the SUCCESS project, a CDM-based simulation system to assist clinical trial feasibility and designing clinical trials. Mr. Lee introduced the principles behind why and how SUCCESS was developed. Mr. Lee then gave a demonstration of SUCCESS system. To provide a better understanding of how a CDM-based simulation system can be implemented, Yoomin spoke about a CDM-based virtual clinical trial project (from the 2nd Korea Clinical Datathon) as a case study. Using the Ajou University Hospital CDM real-world data, her team has successfully shown that patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus, who are treated with metformin, sulfonylurea, and/or dipeptidylpeptidase-4 inhibitors (DPP4i), can benefit from add-on sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) treatment in terms of both additional efficacy and comparable safety. Based on the analysis using this CDM data, adding an SGLT2i has shown an additional efficacy and comparable safety profiles to those identified with SGLT2i in actual clinical trials. Yoomin concluded her talk by stating that exploring the efficacy and safety of the proposed treatment using simulation experiments can help design an optimized clinical trial, which may increase the chance of success in the clinical trials. The talks by Mr. Lee and Yoomin were well received, and an active and interesting Q & A session was followed.

The fifth annual Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Symposium was held on September 15-17, 2019. OHDSI is a multi-stakeholder community on a journey to develop reliable real-world evidence through methodological research and open-source analytics development to bring out the value of observational health data. This year, more than 400 attendees gathered in North Bethesda, Maryland for the symposium. Around 70 participants flew in from Korea, including Prof. Howard Lee and Yoomin Jeon. The symposium had 1 day packed with dynamic and engaging keynote lectures, panel discussions, and a collaborator showcase featuring 7 lightning talks, 10 interactive demonstrations of OHDSI's open-source software, and nearly 80 poster presentations. The other 2 days of the symposium offered more practical hands-on tutorial workshops covering 6 different topics related to real-world data. The tutorial sessions covered the following topics: 1) OMOP Common Data Model & Standardized Vocabularies, 2) Cohort Definition/Phenotyping, 3) Patient-Level Prediction (PLP), 4) Population-Level Estimation (PLE), 5) Data Quality, 6) Extraction, Transformation, and Load process (ETL). Through these hands-on tutorial sessions, Prof. Lee and Yoomin were able to better understand how to leverage the ATLAS, a type of OHDSI's open-source software for designing and executing analytical use cases for clinical characterization, PLP, and PLE within one institution or across the entire OHDSI network. All the tutorial materials can be found here!

As a part of the OHDSI's knowledge-sharing mission, the Book of OHDSI was officially released and distributed for free at the symposium. The book is 470 pages long, consists of twenty chapters in 5 different sections: the OHDSI Community, Uniform Data Representation, Data Analytics, Evidence Quality, and OHDSI Studies. Many OHDSI community members voluntarily chipped-in to summarize all the knowledge developed over its existence into one place, which will assist both newcomers and data science veterans in doing research related to common data model. The book is available on Amazon or online for free.