CONSORE

Consore : Continuum Soins – Recherche

A search engine for big data in oncology

The amount of data accumulated every day in hospitals contains essential information to increase our knowledge of cancer: frequency of side effects, effectiveness of drugs in real life, resistance of certain patients to treatment, etc. Big data technologies now offer the opportunity to exploit this data to advance research and improve cancer care.

But the challenge is considerable. To meet it, Unicancer is building Consore, a powerful search engine capable of finding information scattered in the text of hundreds of thousands of patient files in cancer centres.

A complement to laboratory research

The study of big data is one of Unicancer’s priorities. Its analysis must become an essential complement to laboratory research.

This approach is particularly useful in oncology, as it allows the study of a sufficient number of patients to segment cancers into numerous subtypes and offer personalised medicine to patients.

The technological challenge of big data in health

The amount of data in health is massive. Analysing it is complex, due to its volume and fragmentation in numerous databases and compartmentalised data sources (PMSI, patient records, pharmaceutical records). Most of this information (80%) is stored in text form, which makes it even more complex to use. And structured information is not coded in the same way from one institution to another.

Consore is the first step in facilitating the use of data and is intended to be useful to both researchers and clinicians. It allows :

• Simplified identification of patients to be offered a multi-centre clinical study. This selection step is in common practice costly and time consuming for research teams. Consore identifies in a few seconds the number of patients meeting the main selection criteria in the different centres.
• Synthetic visualization of the pathological history of patients (appearance of a tumour, recurrence, metastasis, second cancer and treatments) and of the care provided in preparation for the multidisciplinary consultation meeting.
• Data analysis for epidemiological, real-life or medico-economic studies.