On Tuesday, September 13th, The Cancer Registry of Norway organized a mini-symposium on “Utilizing Healthcare Registries for personalised cancer prevention and treatment” at the Jonas Einarsson Auditorium, Oslo Cancer Cluster Innovation Park. The symposium brought together representatives from the Certus Centre at Simula Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, BigInsight at the University of Oslo, Karolinska Institute, and of course the host Cancer registry of Norway.

The purpose of the seminar was to exchange information on the utilisation of healthcare registries as a valuable tool in cancer treatment. The first half of the symposium consisted of results from three parallel studies using cervical cancer screening data from 1995 to 2014. Sagar Sen (pictured) spoke about a visulisation tool he developed with Manoel Horta Ribeiro from UFMG, Brazil and Mari Nygård of the cancer registry “Portinari: Interactive Visualization of  Future Patient Trajectories in Cervical Cancer Screening”. The other talks were about markov modelling of the same data, machine learning and seeking collaborations between research groups. Professor Are Magnus Bruaset, Section Director at Simula Research Laboratory, and member of the Certus board of directors, made a presentation about Certus’ research activities and potential avenues for collaboration with the other attending institutions.