Design and Implementing Cancer Data Warehouse to Support Clinical Decisions

Abstract

In the last decade, data warehousing became the most important technology in the field of decision support especially related to critical situations. Most of Decision Support Systems (DSS) related to clinical decisions depend on Data Warehouse (DW) and On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) in analyzing the related information in order to assist clinicians in making right decisions. In this work, cancer data warehouse (CDW) is designed and implemented based on medical paper records of cancer infections. At first, thousands of medical cancer records were turned from paper based into electronic based by registering them in excel files and access database. These files became the source of the proposed cancer DW. Secondly, the proposed cancer DW is depended as a platform to perform different (OLAP) operations to get analytical results that support decisions maker related to cancer infections.

Keywords: Cancer Data Warehouse, Extract Transform and Load (ETL), On- Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), Star Schema, Decision Support System (DSS)