NeuroTexas Institute Center for Computational Neuroscience continues to expand it’s leading-edge patient outcomes database – the ProSpect project.

9/16/2011 9:10:00 AM

Understanding how clinical treatments are associated with patient outcomes is critically important to improving the care delivered to patients. Generally speaking, clinical trials are used to study the efficacy of different medical treatments, with patients randomized to one of the different treatment arms and then outcomes are compared to determine the best treatment for a certain disease or other medical condition. However, in neurosurgery a randomized clinical trial is often impossible when faced with treating the complex and life-threatening conditions often treated by neurosurgeons. For example, when resecting a brain tumor, there is little opportunity for experiment; physicians need to provide the best evidence-based care possible

In late 2010, NeuroTexas Institute at St. David’s HealthCare launched the ProSpect database project – a multi-year effort to develop a database of clinical information that accurately captures the care delivered to neurosurgical patients in a format suitable for research studies providing insight into how to improve patient outcomes. Recently, ProSpect has expanded from it’s focus on core clinical data to include radiological images, pathology and laboratory reports, and surgical reports. In the coming months, the reports will be transformed from unstructured free-text data to structured data fields to facilitate fast searching and analysis of patient data. This exciting project will continue to mature and include new data sources and new algorithms for extracting information from routine clinical data.