CancerGrid: open standards for clinical cancer informatics

Contact:
Prof Marta Kwiatkowska
Midlands e-Science Centre (MeSC)
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT, United Kingdom

Email: informatics-crn-enquiries[at]cs.bham.ac.uk
Website: http://www.cancergrid.org/

The CancerGrid project will deliver modular, distributed software solutions for the key problems of clinical cancer informatics: clinical trial patient entry, randomisation and follow-up; storage and analysis of complex datasets; and linking trial and epidemiology data with profiling information. It will facilitate trials management and future collaboration across international boundaries.

CancerGrid will deliver a working services-based Grid infrastructure for cancer clinical trials. We will produce an implementation of the well-established trial protocols as network services. XML documents containing trial protocol metadata will provide a basis for computation across trials, automating meta-analysis and the integration of trials and bioinformatics information.

A major barrier to the re-use of clinical data is the inconsistent use of similar terminology. This makes it difficult to identify common clinical entities in disparate information systems, and makes automatic linking impossible. CancerGrid will remove this barrier through the establishment of a consensus regarding domain-specific vocabularies and data items.

A necessary requirement for developing open standards for clinical cancer informatics is the development of collaborative environments to allow researchers to quickly and transparently locate data and to communicate with colleagues at remote sites. Building on our existing achievements, CancerGrid will promote the use of Telemedicine to co-ordinate clinical trials between the five distributed sites.

The project team includes medical oncologists, translational researchers, computational biologists, and software engineers from several leading institutions: Cambridge, Oxford, London, Birmingham, and Belfast.