Abstract
Background: Information technology (IT) has emerged as a promising enabler to address the issue of big data in health care. Despite the urgent need for an IT-based tool to tackle this issue, one is not available to specifically study the massive data related to cancer among Saudis.
Objective: To develop a web-based application, which we named "Cancer in Saudi Arabia (CSA)" to provide an interactive, quick, and easy method to reach, extract, compare, and visualize cancer data from Saudi Cancer Incidence Reports (SCIRs).
Methods: We used waterfall model to develop CSA. Next, we used CSA to study the data of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in Saudis reported in the SCIRs (1999-2015).
Results: CSA-based analysis showed that NHL incidence rate increased with age and the disease was more common among males compared with females. In addition, NHL was most predominant in the regions of Riyadh and Eastern, while it was the least prevalent in Jazan Region. Interestingly, the largest proportion of NHL patients was diagnosed in the late stage, and malignant lymphoma, large B-cell diffuse, OS (DLBCL) were the most frequent sub-types of NHL.
Conclusion: As a user-friendly application, we believe that CSA will be a useful tool for studying cancer data in Saudis and will make the data published in SCIRs more reachable and usable. Our findings of NHL provided an almost comprehensive view of the epidemiology of the disease in Saudis for 17 years.