Dr. Andre Dekker, Head Medical Physicist at MAASTRO Clinic in the Netherlands, spoke to medical physics students and faculty about Big Data in Radiation Oncology at the Distinguished Lecture Series on January 19. His research uses large datasets containing information on health history, medical images, blood tests, and other data of patients with the same cancer diagnosis with the aim of developing a better prediction model for patient outcomes that a physician will be able to utilize. A challenge he faces is getting access to quality large datasets, as many features will not be included reliably from center to center across multiple countries since many hospitals are wary of distributing that type of information, or may not even have it. For this reason, Dekker advocates for creating programs that can be sent to a medical center, learn from the data at the center, and output results without the data ever leaving the original owner.
