Article summary
- Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center will unveil its use of digital technology at the upcoming eMerge Americas meeting.
- Sylvester’s My Wellness Research platform rapidly synthesizes large amounts of data to assess the impact of nutrition and diet changes in cancer care.
- The data supports Sylvester’s approach to lifestyle medicine by accurately assessing the behavior of patients and study participants.
Technological advances are revolutionizing our ability to explore the influence of diet and exercise on cancer prevention, treatment and survivorship.
Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Centerwhich is part of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, will unveil its pioneering approach at the next eMerge Americas Meeting April 18 and 19 in Miami Beach.
This year, Sylvester is creating a tremendous cancer lifestyle medicine resource with its proprietary research platform, My research on well-being, as part of its ambitious Sylvester Cancer Data Ecosystem initiative. This comprehensive digital repository will integrate patient-generated lifestyle data with genomic, imaging, clinical records and sociodemographic factors from electronic health records.
Fast lane lifestyle research
“For the first time, we are able to see the direct, real-time impact of cancer treatment and diet and exercise interventions,” said Tracy E. Crane, Ph.D., RDNco-responsible for Cancer program and director of lifestyle medicine, prevention and digital health at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. “The My Wellness research platform allows us to monitor individual patients and populations of people, detect trends, and quickly act on those trends with automated tools and human assistance, if necessary. »
My Wellness Research collects patient data from interactive voice responses, web calls, exercise and nutrition video sessions, and wearable devices. The system facilitates communication between patients and study participants and health coaches and transmits patients’ health and lifestyle information to healthcare providers.
As elements of cancer care move from the clinic to the home, digital tools like My Wellness Research allow researchers and oncologists to monitor patients while providing care remotely.
“Data collected from these wearable devices and remote assessments can be leveraged to develop tailored and more accurate treatment plans and interventions for each patient, generated by their own data,” said Gilberto Lopes, MD, head of Division of Medical Oncology at the Miller School and Associate Director for Global Oncology at Sylvester.
Lifestyle data is generally underrepresented in the field of computational oncology, but impacts patients’ quality of life and health outcomes, according to Gray Freylersythe, senior director of the Crane laboratory at Sylvester’s.
Human Behavior as Big Data
Technology gives researchers tools to answer important questions at scale.
“In the past, we asked study participants about their daily food intake and physical activity, but due to the laboriousness of this type of data collection, we were limited in our ability to study large numbers of people ” said Dr. Crane. “Now that we have access to wearable devices and other technologies, we are beginning to understand the questions that need to be answered through the direct application of lifestyle medicine in the daily lives of cancer patients.”
“Humans are not just a genome,” Freylersythe said. “Lifestyle medicine allows us to intelligently add the human behavior element to the data we collect about people. This can come from a wearable device, like a Fitbit or Apple Watch, or by incorporating the Veggie Meter.®a non-invasive way of documenting a person’s diet in terms of vegetable and fruit consumption, which does not require people to remember or record their consumption, or even provide a blood sample.
The technology also enables data interpretation on a large scale. Sylvester researchers look for vocal patterns in recorded conversations between patients and their health coaches. In the Lifestyle Intervention for Improved Ovarian Cancer Survival (LIVES) study, natural language processing and machine learning make possible the analysis of 17,000 hours of health coaching calls with ovarian cancer survivors.
“It’s not possible for a human being to do this without dedicating their entire career to this work,” Freylersythe said.
The rapid analysis allows the team to create models based on language and sentiment to predict diet and exercise changes among study participants.
Computational oncology
Sylvester’s complex digital work requires the seamless integration of data from the Sylvester Data Portal. According to Vasileios Stathias, Ph.D., deputy director of data science at Sylvester, the portal ensures “FAIR” (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data.
“The Sylvester Data Portal was created to collect, aggregate, standardize and analyze all the different types of data generated by the cancer center,” said Dr. Stathias.
Sylvester uses data from the portal to create a robust picture of the patient, Dr. Stathias said.
“In my view, the only way to truly deliver precision care is to use digital technologies, not to replace human thinking, but to help inform it,” Dr. Crane said. “We and other research teams around the world believe this will improve the overall patient experience and outcomes.” »
Keywords: cancer and exercise, Dr Gilberto Lopes, Dr. Tracy Crane, nutrition, technology
