We are developing a tool to help patients with breast cancer make decisions. To do this, we have been conducting foundational work, including understanding how patients perceive various surgical options, such as contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM), which has become a controversial topic after Angelina Jolie’s announcement.

We are comparing various sources including online health communities, national trends in uptake of surgical options, and search logs to understand how the public perceives CPM and come to understand pros and cons for various decision making points in general. We systematically developed manual annotations around characterizing patients and their posts in online breast cancer communities. These data along with clinical data will be used to develop a prediction model that will help breast cancer patients understand other patients’ trajectory in comparison with their own. We started conducting interviews with breast cancer patients to understand their needs that will be incorporated into our design.

News:
Our students (Lead: Rebecca Marmor) were included in the final 9 teams for the Design Challenge at AMIA 2016!

Related publications:
Forthcoming

Team members:
Rebecca Marmor, MD (Surgery resident, Project lead)
Meera Meghunathan (Medical student)
Elizabeth S. Epstein (Medical student)
Kenneth Trang (High school intern, data manager)
Xiaoqian Jiang, PhD (Machine learning)
Shuang Wang, PhD (Machine learning)
Jihoon Kim, MS (Biostatistics)
Sarah Blair, MD (Oncology)
Jina Huh, PhD (Human Computer Interaction, Social Analytics)

Alumni:
Preuss high school students
Mitchell Boldin (University of Michigan, MSI)