Main Barriers and Needs to Support Clinical Cancer Research via Health Informatics

Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. In order to reduce this burden, new strategies need to be implemented. With the evolution of computational techniques, the amount of clinical data available has increased considerably. However, these data are not always easily accessible, with some barriers of different nature preventing their retrieval and analysis. With the aim of better understanding these barriers and eventually support decision making through digital tools, a literature search has been conducted and, according to the analysis of the resulting bibliography, a survey to validate the literature findings has been distributed to clinical and computer science experts who work on cancer research in different countries. The answers received allow us to identify the main issues that need to be addressed, which are analyzed and presented in this paper. This work is carried out in the context of BD2Decide European Research project.