Q1: How has SPIN evolved since the Shared Pathology Informatics Network?
A1: Beyond searching for discarded Human Tissue, SPIN has been used for Biosurveillance, General Clinical Research, and Resource Discovery.
@See >> DEMOs and publications for specifics. <<
Q2: Is SPIN a peer-to-peer topology or a hub-spoke topology?
A2: SPIN can support many network topologies concurrently in a single deployed system.
P2P models are often deployed when there are a limited number of institutions, at the expense that many routing table rules are needed.
The benefit of the pure p2p (fully meshed) topology is that no single institution is "super" and any node can go offline with 100% network tolerance.
Hub-Spoke Networks are commonly used when there are a larger number of institutions which have previous trust agreements.
Hub-spoke networks have the advantage that less network maintainable is required, at the expense that some institutions have greater responsibility.
@See >> Video Presentation by David Ortiz <<
Q3: Does SPIN support searches for coded clinical data, free text medical notes, or other?
A3: SPIN has evolved from a Pathology specific utility to a federated query library. Using SPIN "extensions", any application can be written to plugin to the SPIN query engine without recompiling the code.
Coded Clinical Data can be searched using the SHRINE system including Demographics, Diagnoses(ICD9),Medications(RxNorm) and Lab values.
Medical Free Text can be searched using PSL and the Scrubber. This is an area of renewed interest.
RDF data can be searched via the Eagle-I program.
@See >> Developer Guide by Clint Gilbert <<