HCI-DC 2014: Cancer, big data and interoperability

The past 40 years has produced major advances in cancer care, with imaging and genomics revealing the molecular abnormalities in individual tumors in vast detail.

Cancer researchers mine “enormous” amounts of data to better understand tumors, but the sheer scope poses challenges, and the current inability to compare data with clinical data elements further hinders efforts, said Joe Gray, PhD, associate director for translational research, Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute, speaking at the Health Care Innovation Day—a joint event hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and West Health Institute.

“Technologies produce raw data that are enormous in scope. It’s more than 100 gigabytes a day, per tumor,” said Joe Gray, PhD, associate director for translational research at OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. To apply technologies to two million new patients per year,  “We’re talking tens of hundreds of terabytes of data. The computation of data is intensive; it takes a week to do a full analysis of a patient.”

Cancer contains tens of thousands of genomic abnormalities, thus researchers have to establish associations of features they want to measure. “Given the complexities of cancer we have to deal with, we have to do association studies of tens of thousands to millions of tumors to identify key signatures to guide key treatments of cancer,” he said.

Gray said the genomics and research communities are making progress on the interoperable exchange of data, “but we have to yet to compare with clinical data elements. We have no ability to do so,” he said.

Security issues also are of concern, he said, thus data exchange must take place in a highly secure environment. Gray said re-identification can occur more easily in an area as complex as cancer.  

“It’s an interesting challenge. We have the analytics power to do precision medicine, and we need genomic and clinical datasets to recursively analyze what can profitably guide precision of cancer care in the future,” he said.