preview

Cancer Project Proposal

Decent Essays

Problem Statement
The goal of our project is to create an interactive tool that will educate users on their risk of developing different forms of cancer based upon their socioeconomic and demographic information, and support healthcare providers in making informed decisions about cancer treatment. This is important because many patients will go to doctors without knowing their risks which leads to certain illnesses going unnoticed. This tool will allow patients to be better informed prior to attending an appointment so they can discuss issues and concerns with their doctor which will hopefully lead to earlier detection of cancer.

Current Practices
Modern approaches in cancer-risk prediction involve many clustering algorithms. Using …show more content…

The proportions that are returned are very similar amongst most cancer types so no significant interpretation can be made of the results. These flaws within the tool prevent the user from acquiring beneficial knowledge on the types of cancer, current risks, and preventative steps they should take.

Novel Approach
Our approach to classification of user’s cancer risks will use a larger number of dimensions to calculate risk of different types of cancers than other similar analytic techniques. The data used for this project will come from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data from the National Cancer Institute. SEER's extensive datasets allow many different analyses to be done from general population cancer statistics (Siegel) to specific medical decision making applications such as whether a certain treatment for prostate cancer would be beneficial (Culp). Other approaches have utilized SEER datasets and supervised classification methods to develop survival prediction models for colon cancer (Al-Bahrani) and chart survival curves for different treatments for lung cancer (Owonikoko). However, these previous approaches have focused on one type of cancer and are therefore less comprehensive than the tool we are seeking to develop. We also plan to implement an interactive, user-friendly visualization tool that allows for quick interpretation of the results. The user would receive a list of cancer they are most

Get Access