Cancer remains a common disease in our society and a leading cause of death today. The Institute for Computer Graphics at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, the Research Department for Medical Informatics at RISC Software Ltd., and the Kepler University Hospital (KUK) teamed up for aresearch project called TourGuide which ended in April 2019. TourGuide focused on developing a type of navigation system to acquire and analyze complex clinical information.

As part of a cancer research project, the visualization experts and medical computer scientists at the JKU and at RISC Software Ltd. developed a research platform that allowed physicians to collect large amounts of patient information and analyze and process this information. Similar to a navigation system, the software is characterized by interactive data visualization in which the system guides users through the information jungle. Medical researchers can see the most important information, allowing them to safely move large amounts of data in order to recognize any valid pattern. The project focused on processing, visualizing, and analyzing information in the tumor database at the Kepler University Hospital for breast and prostate cancer.

The project specifically analyzed treatment and successful therapies for patients age 65+. Researchers at the Kepler University Hospital hope that with the help of the developed software, physicians can improve the long-term prognosis and treatment of older cancer patients and meet the requirements of an ageing society.

The system aims to provide new insight into the widespread disease of cancer and improve patient treatment, particularly those 65+ who have secondary diseases as these diseases can hamper successful cancer treatments. The developed software not only contributes to cancer research in the long run, but also has the potential to give KUK a pioneering role in the field of cancer therapy for older people. The new university research and teaching hospital benefits from the new platform and can use it as a technological platform for additional research projects