The CARELIS data reconciliation system |
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Background |
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Aside from cardiovascular diseases, no other disease causes more deaths in Germany than cancer. In the year 1995, more than 885.000 people in the entire German region died of this disease. In order to fight cancer and to promote the identification of its causes, the provincial government of Lower Saxony decided in 1990 to build up an epidemiological cancer registry. With the necessary help of such a registry it is on the one hand possible to continuously describe the number and distribution of cancer diseases in detail, on the other hand it is also possible to stress distinctive features in the development of the disease. On January 1st, 1995, the Federal Cancer Registry Act came into effect. Within this act, the arrangement of two independent institutions is regulated for an epidemiological cancer registry: in the so-called trust center, patient-related disease reports from physicians, aftercare control centers, clinical registries, pathologists etc. are being collected, and in the so-called registry center patient-related and epidemiological data is being stored and managed. Between these two institutions, data is exchanged in an electronic way, the exchange being based on techniques of information encryption for reasons of security. |
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Project information |
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The software tool CARELIS supports all workflow steps in the registry center of a cancer registry. CARELIS stands for "Carlos Record Linkage System". The term record linkage refers to the process of matching new data against already existent disease reports from the registry and of inserting new disease reports - with potential cross references to other reports which refer to the same patient or tumor - into the registry. In view of the fact that the exact same tumor of a certain patient is possibly being reported several times by different physicians or institutions, not only one but several values are captured in the registry for the different attributes of just one tumor. Out of all these values for one such attribute of a certain tumor, the most plausible value is being stored in a special relation of the registry's database. With the necessary help of the record linkage process one important step towards the correctness of analyses of the data which is stored in cancer registries is taken. Amongst other things, CARELIS makes a sophisticated computer-aided record linkage process available. Between 1994 and 1999, the software was implemented at the OFFIS computer science institute in Oldenburg for the epidemiological cancer registry of Lower Saxony. The main components of CARELIS are
During my studies, I was employed on a part-time basis at the OFFIS computer science institute in Oldenburg. At the beginning of my engagement, I was all by myself responsible for the development of the CARELIS software tool. When the complexity of the software became obvious after the initial analysis of the project's requirments and the rough design of the software, three other computer scientists were hired for the project. At the beginning, the software was developed using the C++ programming language on a UNIX operating system, later, porting the software to Windows operating systems became necessary and was realized with the necessary help of the Microsoft Visual C++ development environment. As a database management system, an ORACLE database was used. The following link provides an exemplary screenshot of the CARELIS software system. |
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Related websites |
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Website of the OFFIS computer science institute. Homepage of Lower-Saxony's epidemiological cancer registry. |
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