Outcomes Lab

How can we extend your life?

The Neuro-Oncology Outcomes Lab seeks to identify treatment procedures used both before and after surgery that improve patient care, quality of life, and mortality rates for patients with brain tumors. While the choice of treatment has the greatest affect on your life, be it surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy, it’s the little things that count when comes to better living; thriving vs. surviving.

Our Databases

Our work focuses specifically on:

Investigating the role of pre-hospital factors in determining access to neurosurgical care

Studying the impact of patient, provider, and hospital level factors in determining inpatient outcomes among brain tumor patients undergoing neurosurgical care

Assessing the role of pre-hospital, patient, provider, and hospital level factors on long-term patient survival

We study patients of all age groups, backgrounds, ethnicities, etc. that have brain tumors in order to produce well-rounded results that can apply to all future hospitals and patients. Some of the outside resources we use are the following:

Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States Database

Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results Database

Medicare Database

SEER-Medicare Linked Database

Nationwide Inpatient Sample

Area Resource File

Prospective Databases

We are currently developing a multi-institutional, web-based database that will prospectively collect clinically relevant data on patients with brain tumors of all kinds. The database will contain pre-hospital variables, inpatient factors such as treatment procedures and pathological results, and long-term collected patient quality of life information. Our goals for this database are to:

Develop and validate quality of life tools for patients in all brain tumors subsets

Critically study the role of pre-hospital, patient, provider, hospital level, and quality of life factors on long-term patient survival

Retrospective Databases

We are currently focused on the study of different brain tumors through our 10-year institutional database. Looking back case allows us to compare cases and distinguish how specific factors impact a patient’s life after surgery. For each tumor type, we focus on the following target areas:

Defining appropriate inpatient and longitudinal outcome measures

Investigating test results and clinical factors predictive of doctor-patient or doctor-staff miscommunication and/or poor outcome

Investigating patient and operative factors contributing to morbidity and mortality around the time of surgery

Assessing the success of various surgical techniques and synthetic agents in the prevention of fluid leakage and organ tissue formation

Investigating laboratory parameters of endocrine disease predictive of response to surgical treatment (for pituitary tumors)

Investigating new testing/viewing measures to predict histological grade and overall survival (for low and high grade gliomas)

Studying histological characteristics predictive of tumor recurrence (for meningiomas)