How Blockchain could empower eHealth: an Application for radiation oncology

Abstract

In this study, we describe our preliminary efforts in building an i2b2-based integrated data repository that supports centralized data management for ovarian cancer clinical research, and discuss important lessons learnt that would inspire the evaluation and enhancement for future generic cancer-specific data repository. We collected multiple types of heterogeneous clinical data, including demographic, outcome, chemo-treatment and lab-test information for ovarian cancer. To better integrate different data types, we conducted data normalization procedures through reusing standard codes and creating mappings between local codes and standard vocabularies. We also developed the extract, transform and load (ETL) scripts to load the data into an i2b2 instance. Through further analytic practices, we evaluated major expectations of the systems according to common clinical research needs, including cohort query and identification, clinical data-based hypothesis-testing, and exploratory data-mining. We also identified and discussed outstanding issues we will address through additional enhancement of existing i2b2 system. Keywords: Integrated data repository · Informatics for integrating biology and the bedside (i2b2) · Cancer registry · Ovarian cancer research · Extract, transform and load (ETL)