Canan Eren

Ph.D.

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Senior Lecturer

PLCO (Learn more about this study)

PLCO-410

Oct 26, 2018

Clinical Cancer Data Analysis

The Computer Science department, part of the Ying Wu College of Computing Sciences, is the largest at NJIT, comprising one tenth of the student population. It is also the largest computer science department among all research universities in the New York metropolitan area. The BA/BS programs in Computer Science are accredited by the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET. The department has a very strong research areas including Health Computing, Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics, Medical Informatics, and Database Management. I am a senior lecturer at the Computer Science department. I teach Database System Design and Management, Advanced Database Systems Design.

My main goal is to train students as clinical data analysts and to ensure that information for clinical trials from databases is collected, compiled and analyzed accurately. I plan to teach my students how to extract, clean and store PLCO data for the Data Warehouse as a first step. Then, this Data Warehouse will be used for Clinical Analysis Systems. By using PLCO data along with Baseline Questionnaire (BQ) and Supplemental Questionnaire (SQX), they will learn cancer data terminology, text retrieval algorithms, extract-transform-load (ETL) process, the different type of Data Warehouse schemas, and how to build a Clinical Intelligence System. Those students who want to learn more about PLCO data will continue and extend this work for their senior project capstone project. They will design a Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system that uses real cancer data to inference patterns in order to generate fact-based diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.

When the students graduate they will be ready to work as a clinical data analyst, to ensure that information for clinical trials from databases is collected, compiled and analyzed accurately. They will have enough knowledge about data collection, data analysis, and written or oral dissemination of data results to support healthcare staff and customers, creating reports, developing clinical applications and monitoring data usage. The graduates, through their academic experience, will have a better chance to work for healthcare associations, hospitals, medical facilities, and cancer research centers. My students will benefit greatly if NCI approves the use of PLCO data for educational purposes.