OncoControl
The multidisciplinary treatment of patients in head-and-neck tumor therapy is a challenging problem for the clinicians involved due to the huge amount of available information. This information stems from diagnostic methods such as patient history, blood count and biopsy results as well as medical imaging techniques like computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET). In order to support the clinicians, these complex information entities must be processed in a meaningful way. The project OncoControl is the realization of a web-based system which is intended to support the head and neck oncology in exploration, analysis and management of patient data.
The central idea in developing OncoControl is the improvement of the oncological therapy decision-making processes in the field of complex head and neck tumors, improving existing work and treatment processes as well as a support of the decision-making process in the tumor board through the use of endoscopy images and 3D tumor reconstructions alongside the current unused slice images from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Additionally, a new and innovative form of presentation, the “treatment summary”, supports the clinicians after opening the patient file with a compressed representation of all relevant information in the current treatment step and provides a quick overview of the current patient status.
Associated publications:
Birnbaum, Zebralla, Boehm, Dietz, Neumuth. „Metric Learning for TNM-Classifications of Patients with Head and Neck Tumors“. CARS 2016 Proceedings. Heidelberg, 2016.
Meier, Jens, Stefan Bohn, Bernhard Glaser, Klemens Birnbaum, Andreas Boehm, und Thomas Neumuth. „The Treatment Planning Unit: Concept and realization of an integrated multimedia decision support system for multidisciplinary team meetings“. In MedInfo 2015. Sao Paolo, 2015.
Meier, Jens, Andreas Dietz, Andreas Boehm, and Thomas Neumuth. “Predicting Treatment Process Steps from Events.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics 53 (February 2015): 308–19. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2014.12.003.
The development of the clinical information system OncoControl allows the physician to get all information about existing patients in a consistent and structured way as well as to retrieve clinical documents such as medical reports or surgery reports. Furthermore, OncoControl allows the clinicians to create and make use of existing information for clinical trials, quality management or conducting clinical certifications. Building on the established central database innovative and knowledge-based methods will assist the clinicians, for example for the TNM classification or document generation in diagnosis, treatment strategy, documentation, as well as presentation and patient education and thus facilitate their clinical practice and the communication between professionals. The use of automated procedures should also pave the way for standardized procedures and comparable analysis results.
