Life Sciences Workbench

The Life Science Workbench was a collaboration between IBM, Harvard-MIT Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Complex Biosystems Modeling Laboratory (CBML). The concept was to enable collaborative work between Biologists, Computer Scientists and Physicists to generate predictive models of brain tumor growth.

October 2003

Created for Harvard-MIT Martinos Center, MGH and Complex Biosystems Modeling Laboratory

Team members: Alister Lewis-Bowen, Louis Weitzman

We were asked to develop scenarios describing how such a Workbench might look and how its Users might interact with it.

The deliverables provided a blueprint for how the application would be built. We worked closely with a Biologist, Simulation Engineer and laboratory director to understand their day to day tasks, identifying where points of collaboration could be made more efficient. These interviews and observations formed the Personas on which key scenarios were built. Working closely with these Users, we iterated on a low and high-resolution walk-throughs of the user interface. They worked with the IBM development team to understand the implementation constraints to create higher resolution scenarios.

The resulting design work provided the guiding force behind the client development and implementation, helped the Client attain an academic grant to fund the pilot, and generated 7 patent disclosures for the user interface used within the application.

Persona tasks and tools

Summary presentation of the persona tasks and tools for whom the workbench is designed.

A simulation workflow in action

Screen shot from a scenario that shows how a user runs a simulation using a flow diagram of a set of building blocks.

Comparason of combined results

Screen shot from a scenario that presents the comparison of results combined from real tumor growth and simulated results.

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