A patient-centered tumor tissue information management system

Cancer, a disease which has been a serious threaten to people's health, is of great concern to scientists. But the study on it has not made substantial progress attributed to its multi-factor incidents. Specimen information in the tissue, as one of the important data sources of the translational research, plays an indispensable role in promoting the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. With the advent of the era of “big data”, it becomes extremely significant to associate the clinical information with the basic research information and to manage the information of the bio-specimen efficaciously, so that some analysis such as data-mining can be done with the follow-up information obtained. However, the existing information management systems of tissue banks only focus on the storing, importing, and exporting of the bio-specimen, while the information of the area of basic research is overlooked. Therefore, we proposed and established a tumor tissue information management system, which can associate the clinical information with the molecular experimental information, so as to establish an information database of tissue samples and to avoid the miss of experimental information. A case study for colorectal cancer research was applied by using the proposed system, which demonstrated the feasibility of our patient-centered tumor tissue information management system.