Julia Evangelou Strait, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis writes:
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to quickly understand how best to fight the virus, but it also presents challenges to initiating studies involving actual patients, such as obtaining consent when patients are critically ill or recruiting patients who may be reluctant to leave their homes.
But what if some research could be conducted using synthetic datasets that mimic real patient populations but don’t carry the risk of disclosing protected health information? That’s the aim behind an initiative at the Institute for Informatics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The institute is making synthetic datasets more widely available to university researchers, with the goal of speeding up research that could save lives.
Read more on Medical Xpress.