I maintain a private OHDSI ATLAS instance (ATLAS v2.15, WebAPI v2.15.1) and am trying to follow the instructions for setting up the “Explore Evidence” feature in ATLAS found here.
My understanding is that I need to obtain the “CEM_UNIFIED” and “NC_LU_CONCEPT_UNIVERSE” tables from the Common Evidence Model (CEM). However, I’m concerned about currency - the CEM repo was last updated 5+ years ago, and according to FAIRsharing.org the CEM is deprecated.
Two questions:
Is building the CEM still the recommended path for “Explore Evidence” in ATLAS, or has the workflow changed?
Is there a current prebuilt CEM available to load (e.g. a Postgres dump), rather than reconstructing it from the original sources?
In the initial release of Atlas 3.0, we’re planing on removing the explore evidence (specifically for the reasons you provided). There are other HADES packages or information out there for selecting a set of negative controls (the primary use-case of the Explore Evidence Feature), and once we can nail down what the official process is, we can re-introduce negative control selection back into Atlas.
Looking through HADES, the closest fit for selecting negative controls seems to be MethodEvaluation, but it draws on pre-existing sets (e.g. the OMOP reference set) rather than generating controls for a given exposure/outcome.
For programmatic generation, CemConnector looks like the intended tool, but its public endpoint (https://cem.ohdsi.org) is currently returning a 503, so I can’t tell whether it’s still maintained.
Is there a way to programmatically generate/suggest negative controls, or is MethodEvaluation the best alternative for now?