Clinical decision support framework for validation of multiscale models and personalization of treatment in oncology

The implementation of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) solutions is an important prerequisite for reducing the knowledge gap between clinical research and practice, especially in a complex genetic disease such as cancer. However, current CDS solutions are unable to support all the complex decisions required for personalized treatment of cancer patients and become quickly obsolete due to the high rate of change in therapeutic options and knowledge. Our CDS framework enables the development of decision support tools that flexibly integrate a large variety of multiscale models and can leverage the efforts of a large community of modellers. In our implementation, we combine community-developed models described in the literature (e.g. the St. Gallen stratification for early breast cancer) and models derived by mining the comprehensive datasets from clinical trials and care brought together in the p_Medicine collaborative research project. This framework and its underlying solution for models storage, management and execution will also constitute a platform for continuous validation of existing models on new data. Our goal is to enable the reuse of existing models for CDS and for the development of new models, and to support collaboration among modellers, CDS implementers, biomedical researchers and clinicians. We initially develop and deploy our solution in the context of the p-Medicine project in the oncology domain, but we aim to expand our scope and to reach out to a wide community of users in the biomedical area.