137. MPEG virtual meeting

The 137th MPEG meeting was held digitally from January 17th to 21st 2022. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

MPEG Genomic Coding evaluated Responses on New Advanced Genomics Features and Technologies

The extensive usage of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies enables new approaches to healthcare known as “precision medicine” as well as many other emerging applications such as monitoring the evolution of outbreaks and pathogen surveillance in agriculture and the food industry. DNA sequencing technologies produce extremely large amounts of heterogeneous data including raw sequence reads, analysis results, annotations, and associated metadata which are stored in different repositories worldwide and the use of the data needs to be enabled by standardized and interoperable formats. Structuring and high-performance compression of such genomic data is required to reduce the storage size, increase the transmission speed, and improve the browsing and searching performance of these large data sets as required by a wide variety of applications and use cases. The current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) addresses the representation, indexing, compression, and transport of genome sequencing data with support for annotation data and searching capability. The ISO/IEC 23092 (MPEG-G) standard series provides a file and transport format, compression technology, metadata specifications, protection support, and standard APIs for the access of genomic data and annotation data in a native compressed format.

At the 134th MPEG meeting, MPEG Genomic Coding (WG 06) had previously issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) to collect submissions of new technologies improving the current compression, transport and indexing capabilities of the ISO/IEC 23092 standard series.

Now at the 137th MPEG meeting, MPEG Genomic Coding (WG 08) evaluated submitted responses to the CfP, addressing the representation and usage of graph genome references and supporting interfaces with existing standards for the interchange of clinical data. The initial evaluation results show that the incorporation of native representations of graph genome references into the MPEG-G standard is desirable and will provide new, advanced, and efficient representation capabilities for extended support of use cases of genomic sequencing data. Concerning the support of interfaces with existing standards for the interchange of clinical data (HL7 and FHIR) the response received shows that such an extension is desirable for the efficient integration of MPEG-G data into clinical workflows and shows a standardization path to achieve such integration.

A summary of the main achievements from the MPEG meeting can be found here.

Picture Source: somorgado / pixabay