The purpose of this Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) is to inform potential applicants that the National Eye Institute (NEI) is interested in supporting research to develop innovative informatics and data science methods, algorithms, and tools to improve data acquisition, analysis, visualization, annotation, integration, and interpretation. The emphasis will be on innovation and its potential impact on vision research, including discovery biology, population studies, as well as clinical and translational research.

This NOSI aims to stimulate the development of innovative informatics technologies, algorithms, tools, and methods to leverage data science to facilitate transformative research for improving vision health and understanding of the visual system. Specific areas of research interest include but are not limited to the following:  

• Develop new and innovative analytical and software platforms to improve the ability of researchers to process complex samples and data types to facilitate data analysis, interpretation, and integration.
• Advance uniform standards for data collection to improve data interoperability, integration, curation, and analysis, and to enhance data sharing and reproducibility.
• Develop new method(s) for machine learning or deep learning to improve cross-modality data analysis (e.g., electronic health record, imaging, and genomics data), or to explore ways to train models using federated learning.
• Develop innovative data management and sharing platforms that can be widely implemented by research labs (including use of cloud resources) to facilitate data sharing and to promote data integration with commonly used large data repositories.
• Create new data acquisition methods or software for laboratory equipment and wearable devices.

To be successful, there must be a clear rationale for how the proposed informatics technologies, tools, methods, and/or algorithms are novel and how they will benefit vision research in support of NEI’s mission to eliminate vision loss and improve quality of life. Applications submitted in response to this NOSI are required to include data management and resource sharing plans for how data, tools, algorithms, and methods generated by the supported projects will be shared and made widely available to the broader research community.

This notice applies to due dates on or after June 16, 2023, and subsequent receipt dates through February 16, 2026. 
 

NOT-EY-23-005