TRAIN

This project unites academic, industrial and clinical leaders to improve care for cancer patients via Big Data science.
TRAIN will focus on head & neck cancer, which is a societal challenge both in India and The Netherlands due to its disappointing outcomes, practice variations, high incidence and the level resources needed for diagnosis and treatment. TRAIN will address this challenge by the introduction of Decision Support Systems (DSSs) that can predict which treatment leads to an optimal outcome given the individual patient characteristics and local diagnostic and treatment capabilities.

These DSSs will be based on outcome prediction models, which will be learned from Big Data by machine learning algorithms in India and The Netherlands. TRAIN will do this, via a unique and innovative approach, called the Personal Health Train (PHT), which enables machine learning from cancer Big Data without the need for data to leave the individual hospital.
The PHT has important advantages, in terms of privacy and data control concerns, over other Big Data approaches, but requires data to become Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) in each participating hospital. Making data FAIR is the major challenge in TRAIN but feasible due to the existing collaboration between partners and prior work in this area.

Finally, TRAIN will perform a prospective clinical trial using the DSSs to show clinical benefit and provide clear path to clinical introduction of Decision Support Systems.

This is a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in 2019; Indo-Dutch grant (629.002.212).