Identification of Key Elements in Prostate Cancer for Ontology Building via a Multidisciplinary Consensus Agreement

Authors

Amy Moreno
Abhishek A Solanki
Tianlin Xu
Ruitao Lin
Jatinder Palta
Emily Daugherty
David Hong
Julian Hong
Sophia C Kamran
Evangelia Katsoulakis
Kristy Brock
Mary Feng
Clifton Fuller
Charles Mayo

Publication Date

6-8-2023

Journal

Cancers

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Clinical data collection related to prostate cancer (PCa) care is often unstructured or heterogeneous among providers, resulting in a high risk for ambiguity in its meaning when sharing or analyzing data. Ontologies, which are shareable formal (i.e., computable) representations of knowledge, can address these challenges by enabling machine-readable semantic interoperability. The purpose of this study was to identify PCa-specific key data elements (KDEs) for standardization in clinic and research.

METHODS: A modified Delphi method using iterative online surveys was performed to report a consensus agreement on KDEs by a multidisciplinary panel of 39 PCa specialists. Data elements were divided into three themes in PCa and included (1) treatment-related toxicities (TRT), (2) patient-reported outcome measures (PROM), and (3) disease control metrics (DCM).

RESULTS: The panel reached consensus on a thirty-item, two-tiered list of KDEs focusing mainly on urinary and rectal symptoms. The Expanded Prostate Cancer Index Composite (EPIC-26) questionnaire was considered most robust for PROM multi-domain monitoring, and granular KDEs were defined for DCM.

CONCLUSIONS: This expert consensus on PCa-specific KDEs has served as a foundation for a professional society-endorsed, publicly available operational ontology developed by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) Big Data Sub Committee (BDSC).

Keywords

prostate cancer, clinical guidelines, treatment-related toxicities, informatics, ontology

Comments

Supplementary Materials

PMID: 37370731