Open-source solution "ehrapy" offers new opportunities for health data analysis

Scientists from Helmholtz Munich and Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed an accessible software solution specifically designed for the analysis of complex medical health data. The open-source software called “ehrapy” enables researchers to structure and systematically examine large, heterogeneous datasets. The software is available to the global scientific community to use and further develop.

Co-Developer is Prof. Fabian Theis, DZL scientist at the Munich Site (CPC-M). The Director of the Institute of Computational Biology hopes that Ehrapy will be quickly adopted at various sites: “Establishing such technologies in medicine is a lengthy process that can take decades. Our goal is to bridge the gap between biomedical research and practical application in medicine. We are also trying to support academic and commercial players in the healthcare sector.”

Exploratory Approach – Hypothesis-Free Analysis

Ehrapy is intended to fill a critical gap in the analysis of health data, says Lukas Heumos, one of the main developers and a scientist at the Institute of Computational Biology at Helmholtz Munich and the Technical University of Munich (TUM): “Until now, there have been no standardized tools for systematically and efficiently analyzing diverse and complex medical data. We’ve changed that with ehrapy."

Together with many other contributors, Heumos has used his expertise in scientific software development to create a solution for analyzing patient data: “Ehrapy can uncover new patterns and generate insights without needing to analyze the data based on a specific assumption or hypothesis. This exploratory approach brings fresh perspectives to health data analysis. Due to their complexity and heterogeneity, these data are often not analyzed as effectively as they could be.”

In the future, the team plans to provide standardized databases for electronic health records (EHRs). These databases will enable better integration and analysis of large volumes of medical data. Additionally, this will facilitate the development of EHR atlases that can serve as reference datasets for contextualizing and annotating new datasets.

Ehrapy on GitHub:https://github.com/theislab/ehrapy

Original publication: Heumos et al. (2024): Exploratory electronic health record analysis with ehrapy. Nature Medicine. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-024-03214-0