de.KCD Summer School - Cloud Essentials for Medical Data

2 Jul 2025, 09:00 → 3 Jul 2025, 16:30 Europe/Berlin

Lecture Hall (BioQuant)

 

 

This hands-on summer school introduces doctors, clinical staff, and medical researchers to the fundamentals of cloud technology and digital tools for handling sensitive data, using the de.NBI cloud. Through practical sessions and real-world examples, participants will explore virtual machines, data protection, large language models, and workflow platforms, tailored specifically for clinical environments. No technical background is required; the focus is on empowering healthcare professionals to safely and effectively use cloud resources.

 

Registration will be open until June 16. We will let selected people know shortly after.

 

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Organizer:

In Cooperation With:

Hosts:

Ivo Buchhalter, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg 
Sina Barysch, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg

Wednesday 2 July

09:00 → 09:30 Welcome and Introduction

09:30 → 10:30 Introduction to Virtual Machines and Basic Unix (with de.NBI SimpleVMs) | How to use a virtual machine - a secure, personal computer in the cloud - provided by the de.NBI cloud. Basics of the Unix system, which is a powerful and widely used environment in research and data handling.

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 → 12:00 Simple VM II

12:00 → 13:00 Lunch Break

13:00 → 15:00 Exploring OpenStack: Your Cloud Control Panel | OpenStack is a tool that lets you manage your cloud resources - like storage and computing power - through a user-friendly web interface. In this session, you’ll learn how to launch and control your own virtual machines.

OpenStack is a tool that lets you manage your cloud resources - like storage and computing power - through a user-friendly web interface. In this session, you’ll learn how to launch and control your own virtual machines

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee Break

15:35 → 17:05 Using Large Language Models (LLMs) in Medicine | Introduces the concept of LLMs (like ChatGPT) and how they can be tailored to specific medical contexts to train and fine-tune an LLM for custom clinical terminology and privacy needs (including limitations).

Thursday 3 July

09:00 → 10:30 Sensitive Data and Patient Privacy: What You Need to Know | Basics of data protection laws (like GDPR), secure data storage, and ethical use of medical information in the cloud.

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 → 12:00 Sensitive Data II

12:00 → 13:00 Lunch Break

13:00 → 15:00 Introduction to the Galaxy platform for reproducible and transparent data analysis, with a demonstration of how it is used to analyse proteomics data from the Freiburg Molecular Tumor Board.

This session introduces the Galaxy platform as a user-friendly solution
for data storage, analysis, sharing, and workflow management, enabling
reproducible and transparent biomedical data analyses. A hands-on
component will provide participants with practical experience using
Galaxy on a simple dataset. An exemplary clinical use case will
demonstrate how proteomics data from molecular tumor board patients can
be analyzed within Galaxy, with the resulting reports included as part
of the information used in molecular tumor board decision-making.

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 → 16:00 Local Initiatives: Connecting Medical Data in the Region | Overview of regional efforts to improve medical data sharing across institutions.

16:00 → 16:30 Conclusions / Closing