National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Quantitative Clinical Cardiovascular Epidemiology Project

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute would like to develop innovative analytical methods that will be used to provide insight into disease processes and prevention in addition to formulating prognostic strategic decision aids with which individual patient's responses to disease and treatment are accurately predicted. The required capabilities of the successful contractor will be: (1) Combined expertise in machine learning, random forests methods, data ontologies and semantics, and clinical epidemiology in cardiovascular medicine and surgery (2) Large patient volumes (in the hundreds of thousands for procedures and in the millions for common cardiovascular tests) (3) Digitally recorded data, using systematic field definitions, on thousands of phenotypic fields. (4) Large computer grids for running processor intensive multilayered bootstrap analyses. The following six (06) areas represent examples of the contractor's ability to provide the services required for successful development and acquisition of NHLBI's desired methods: (1) Over 200,000 electronically documented cardiovascular stress tests with systematically recorded digital variables for each; (2) Over 1.3 million electrocardiograms with digitally recorded variable for each; (3) Over 100,000 documented cardiovascular interventional procedures, with digitally recorded variables for each; (4) Access to an electronic medical records infrastructure that has the capability of recording over 1 million patient encounters per year. (5) Personnel and computer environments that have generated successful preliminary examples of random forest methods for assessment of heart rate recovery after exercise and outcomes among patients with esophageal cancer. It is anticipated this project will investigate new methods for developing and evaluating algorithmic methods for analyzing large sets of censored data. The methods employed will include Logical Analysis of Data (LAD) and Random Survival Forests (RSF). Testing will be conducted on a variety of cohorts, including patients undergoing isolated coronary artery bypass surgery, asymptomatic adults undergoing screening studies, patients with valve disease, patients undergoing exercise testing, and patients with heart failure. This notice of intent is not a request for competitive proposals. Interested parties may provide capability statements detailing their abilities. Any submissions received within ten (10) calendar days after publication of this synopsis will be considered by the Government. A determination by the Government not to compete this proposed award based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will normally be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement.