>22 million

patient records

>100 

ORNL staff participating 

in Deep Learning User

Group

2017 

HPCwire Award 

for Best Use of 

AI for CANDLE

Health Data Sciences at 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

The increasingly large, complex, and diverse datasets being generated across the scientific 

spectrum show great promise in revolutionizing our understanding of many of today’s most 

pressing scientific challenges, including healthcare. 

Truly achieving an enhanced understanding of health drivers and outcomes requires parsing and 

making sense of today’s vast health datasets, a process that in turn requires a research environment 

with world-class facilities; expertise across computing, data, and medical science; and an 

infrastructure capable of protecting sensitive health information. ORNL has all three. In recognition 

of its unique capabilities in advancing national health missions, the Laboratory established 

the Health Data Sciences Institute (HDSI) in 2013. Specifically, the Institute is tasked with three 

primary objectives:

• Delivering scientific innovation, informatics tools, and a computing infrastructure to enable the 

effective use of data for public benefit

• Advancing a broad range of sponsor and health policy priorities and the health research 

community at large

• Growing the health data science community via a user facility for collaboration, 

education, and training

HDSI includes biomedical researchers, system architects, data scientists, computer scientists, 

mathematicians, IT services, and high-performance computing experts. Via HDSI and related efforts, 

ORNL aspires to become the primary hub for national health data R&D.

“The convergence of health-related data 

 and associated applications demands 

 computing and analytics at large scales.”

 Gina Tourassi 

 Director, ORNL Health 

 Data Sciences Institute

ORNL researchers are utilizing advanced 

artificial intelligence (AI) and the fastest 

supercomputer on Earth to understand 

the effectiveness of cancer treatments 

and key drivers of cancer outcomes at 

the population level.

85 HDSI

publications
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle LLC for the US Department of Energy

www.ornl.gov March 2019

Why ORNL?

• ORNL offers unparalleled user facilities such as the Oak 

Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Spallation Neutron 

Source, and Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, all of 

which produce enormous datasets and require ORNL to 

maintain a robust expertise in data science.

• The Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer, with a peak 

speed of 200 petaflops, is currently the world’s most 

powerful system for science and is specifically designed to 

train AI software (or algorithms) to tackle large 

scientific datasets.

• ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source enables the study of 

cancer initiation events at atomistic scales.

• The CADES–Knowledge Discovery Infrastructure 

(CADES-KDI) houses nearly 23 million individual Veterans 

Affairs (VA) patient records, the most comprehensive set of 

health and genomic data on the planet.

• ORNL staff possess unprecedented expertise across a wide 

range of computing and data science, including large-scale 

computation, graph analytics, and AI, and proven success 

utilizing population-scale medical data to enable 

translational “quantitative biology” science.

• The Laboratory is tasked with pushing the boundaries of 

privacy-aware computing for scalable, sensitive data.

Partnerships

and Collaborations

HDSI is currently assisting numerous and varied critical health efforts at both the state and national levels, including the following:

• Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer – DOE has partnered with the National Cancer Institute for 

an enhanced understanding of cancer biology and its application in facilitating new drug discovery and development and in 

applying big data analytics to a suite of cancer databases to optimize therapies. ORNL researchers are involved in three pilots, 

simultaneously pushing the boundaries of both computational science and our understanding of cancer.

• Cancer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) – CANDLE is a scalable deep neural network code that addresses 

three top challenges of the National Cancer Institute: understanding the molecular basis of key protein interactions, developing 

predictive models for drug response, and automating the analysis and extraction of information from millions of cancer patient 

records to determine optimal cancer treatment strategies. The CANDLE project is also helping to inform the next generation of 

supercomputing architectures.

• Tennessee Department of Health – HDSI is partnering with the TDH to 

harness the power of data analytics in understanding what areas of the 

state are at the most risk for increased addiction rates and how to best 

allocate resources.

• MVP-CHAMPION – Because ORNL securely hosts millions of VA health 

records, HDSI researchers are perfectly positioned to assist clinical 

investigators in advancing clinical outcomes for both veterans and the 

larger population.

Contact: Gina Tourassi

Director, ORNL Health Data Sciences Institute

tourassig@ornl.gov, 865-576-4829

One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37830

ORNL’s unique suite of capabilities 

makes it an ideal partner in the quest 

to tackle today’s most data-centric 

health challenges.