Intelligent Interface for Adjuvant Treatment Planning in Breast Cancer

The primary course of therapy for breast cancer patients, following surgery, depends on the expected prognosis together with the key clinical indicators. An interface for use by clinical oncologists is proposed, which addresses three fundamental questions, namely; evidence that the currently used Nottingham Prognostic Index can be enhanced by additional clinical features, prognostic inference for individual patients with quantified confidence levels, and visualisation of the patient database by clinical indicator of adjuvant treatment. This interface is underpinned by detailed prognostic analysis validated through longitudinal cohort studies of mortality with 931 TNM stage I/II patients recruited between 1990 and 1993 at Christie Hospital, Wilmslow. The data shown in the interface are Kaplan-Meier curves from prognostic risk groups inferred by cross validation.