Data Science for Supporting Molecular Tumor Boards

Video recording

Molecular Tumor Boards are interdisciplinary teams of medical experts which come together to obtain therapy recommendations for complex oncological cases. In recent years, these recommendations are more and more based on molecular profiling of tumors, in particular the sequencing of cancer genes followed by the detection of genetic variants. The PREDICT project set out to develop systems and algorithms for supporting such decision-making. We will discuss the main results of this project i.e. (1) VIST, a search engine specifically constructed to find clinically relevant documents given a patient’s variant profile, (2) I-VIS, a framework for building integrated precision oncology databases, and (3) BRONCO, the first open and annotated corpus of German medical texts.  Building these systems required advanced NLP technologies, the application of modern machine learning methods, and robust data integration technologies.

Ulf Leser is a full professor at the Institute for Computer Science at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin. He obtained his PhD in Data Integration from Technische Universität Berlin. After app. three years in the software industry, he returned to academia as professor for Knowledge Management in Bioinformatics. His main research interests are semantic data integration, text mining, statistical Bioinformatics, and large-scale scientific data analysis. His group not only develops novel algorithms for these tasks but also applies them in a set of highly interdisciplinary collaborative projects for studying concrete biomedical questions, especially in cancer research. He is speaker of the Collaborative Research Center "Foundations of Workflows for Large-Scale Scientific Data Analysis (FONDA)" and of the collaborative research project "Comprehensive Data Integration for Precision Oncology (PREDICT)". From 2014-2019, he was speaker of the Research Training Group "Service-oriented Architectures for Health Care Systems (SOAMED)".

Furthermore, he currently is principal investigator in the interdisciplinary graduate schools "Computational Methods for Precision Oncology (CompCancer)“ and “Helmholtz-Einstein International Berlin research school on Data Science“.