BLUE :

A Better Lims User Experience

Motivation

To catalog tissue samples, our lab uses a LIMS (laboratory information management system) offered through Platform for Science^TM. While the data itself is well organized, navigating and quering the site is limited and cumbersome. To address this problem I wanted to build a tool that was easy to use and gave us more options in querying and visuzalizing our database

App Features

• Log in: Uses user credentials to generate metadata API call to determine access.

• Data Retrieval: Using the same credentials at log in, will perform another API call to retrieve the entire LIMS dataset and undergoes data wrangling and standardization.

  • A separate API call is made between login in and data retrieval as the metadata API is quicker and allows for faster user authentication

• Home:

  • Data Search tab: Individual donor search options for three types of data:
    1. Freezer location - most used so it gets its own search
    2. Assorted information - allows to search individual column information for any donor
    3. Notes - pulls past medical history, donor information, or patient chart information
  • Donor Search tab: sends API call to updatable google sheet to allow for searching of donor names in the case a researchers personal notes do not line up with the database's names

• Plots:

  • Barcharts: Gives overview of some basic categories within dataset. Also allows for coloring by subgroup
  • Histograms: Choosing any numeric column, allows for the production of a histogram with adjustable bin number, filtering by category, grouping by category, and histogram layout style

• Tables:

  • Category tab: Column choices are based on the original column category options in the Platform for Science^TM LIMS system. All category options include those found in Basic Info. Also allows for filtering based on donor, age, gender, and race. *Personalized tab: Allows for the construction of a personalized table. Starts with the basic columns seen when opening tabs. Can also be filtered based on donor, age, gender, and race.