Data organization in PIC-SURE

PIC-SURE integrates clinical and genomic datasets. Each variable is organized as a concept path that contains information about the study, variable group, and variable. Though the specifics of the concept paths are dependent on the type of study, the overall information included is the same.

Table of Data Fields in PIC-SURE

General organization	Data are organized in groups of like variables, when available. For example, variables like Age, Gender, and Race could be part of the Demographics variable group.
Concept path structure	\study\variable name
Variable ID	Equivalent to variable name
Variable name	Encoded variable name that was used by the original submitters of the data
Variable description	Description of the variable, as available
Dataset ID	Equivalent to dataset name
Dataset name	Name of a group of like variables, as available
Dataset description	Description of a group of variables, as available
Study ID	ID or name of the study
Study description	Description of the study

Note that there are two data types in PIC-SURE: categorical and continuous data. Categorical variables refer to any variables that have categorized values. For example, “Have you ever had asthma?” with values “Yes” and “No” is a categorical variable. Continuous variables refer to any variables that have a numeric range of values. For example, “Age” with a value range from 10 to 90 is a continuous variable. The internal PIC-SURE data load process determines the type of each variable based on the data.