oncologywatch

McConnell P, Dash RC, Chilukuri R, et al. The Cancer Translational Research Informatics Platform. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2008 Dec 24;8(1):60. PMID: 19108734

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center and SemanticBits (Herndon, Virginia) describe a new outcomes analysis tool that allows oncologists to query clinical data from geographically dispersed patients with similar characteristics to find treatments that were administered with success. The Cancer Translational Research Informatics Platform (caTRIP, https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/tools/caTRIP) facilitates the aggregation of clinical and molecular cancer data which can then be exchanged across institutions.

The authors detail the objectives, overall software architecture, security, implementation, usability, and future development plans for caTRIP. From the paper:

“A motivating use case for the development of caTRIP is one of outcomes analysis, whereby a clinician can query data from a cohort of preexisting patients to help guide treatment of another patient. An oncologist can ask "What are the treatments and outcomes of other patients that have similar characteristics to my patient?" caTRIP makes this possible on multiple levels: local, institutional, regional, national, and beyond by leveraging grid infrastructure to scale beyond traditional query systems."

The tool has the potential to effectively broaden institutional experience with highly atypical cancers:

"The fact of the matter is that even a large tertiary care facility will rarely come across such tumors. caTRIP provides a mechanism to examine all those patients who have been seen at any institution where caTRIP has been deployed and identify the cohort of patients that matches the specified criteria. It is a matter of a few minutes, at most, to construct a query that narrows the cohort to patients that have lobular tumors of the breast, are ER negative, PR negative, and Her-2/neu overexpressed. Furthermore, the type of treatment employed and the time to recurrence or death are easily captured as part of the result set by drawing upon the Tumor Registry as an additional data source. This permits a level of decision in the clinic - heretofore impossible with prior technologies."

caTRIP is available on the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s caBIG™ Community Website.

OncologyWatch: Posts about free-access articles on aspects of oncology theory, practice and policy (about the blogger). This blog is not a source for medical advice.

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