Coping with breast cancer more and more becomes a major socio-economic challenge not least due to its constantly increasing incidence in the developing world. There is a growing need for novel strategies to improve understanding and capacity to predict resilience of women to the variety of stressful experiences and practical challenges related to breast cancer. This is a necessary step toward efficient recovery through personalized interventions. BOUNCE will bring together modelling, medical, and social sciences experts to advance current knowledge on the dynamic nature of resilience as it relates to efficient recovery from breast cancer. BOUNCE will take into consideration clinical, cancer-related biological, lifestyle, and psychosocial parameters in order to predict individual resilience trajectories throughout the cancer continuum and eventually increase resilience in breast cancer survivors and help them remain in the workforce and enjoy a better quality of life. BOUNCE will deliver a unified clinical model of modifiable factors associated with optimal disease outcomes and will deploy a prospective multi-centre clinical pilot at four major oncology centres (in Italy, Finland, Israel and Portugal), where a total of 660 women will be recruited in order to assess its clinical validity against crucial patient outcomes (illness progression, wellbeing, and functionality). The advanced computational tools to be employed will validate indices of patients’ capacity to bounce back during the highly stressful treatment and recovery period following diagnosis of breast cancer. The overreaching goal of BOUNCE is to incorporate elements of a dynamic, predictive model of patient outcomes in building a decision-support system used in routine clinical practice to provide physicians and other health professionals with concrete, personalized recommendations regarding optimal psychosocial support strategies.
The vision of BOUNCE is to develop a resilience trajectory predictor that will take into consideration biological, social, environmental, lifestyle, occupational and psychosocial status in order to predict levels of resilience of women with breast cancer throughout the cancer continuum, propose resilience-building interventions to those who need it the most and eventually increase illness adaptation toward optimal clinical, well-being and functionality outcomes. BOUNCE proposes a holistic integrative and dynamic approach for investigating various heterogeneous but relevant biological, social, environmental, lifestyle, occupational, and socio-economic and psychosocial factors as they interact over time during the immediate cancer post-diagnosis period to account for individual fluctuations in resilience and eventually contribute to clinical outcomes and patient well-being.
The key technological aspects of BOUNCE include: - The development of an In Silico Resilience Trajectory Predictor (RTP) which will provide input to a decision support system for predicting the resilience evolution in women with breast cancer throughout the cancer continuum. This will be built by using predictive modeling technologies through a multi-disciplinary approach engaging social sciences and humanities (SSH), medicine and computer science. - The development of a Resilience Status Classifier based on the RTP and holistic, temporal patient information in the context of a multicenter clinical pilots in the project which will be dynamically collected using an enhanced version of the pioneer Noona breast cancer patient empowerment technology [10]. This technological aspect is explained in Fig. 2. - A decision support module that will follow the RTP for each breast cancer patient and provide indications to the clinician/caregiver for more personalised resilience building interventions as early as possible in order to help them patients bounce back faster, remain in the workforce and enjoy a better quality of life throughout the cancer continuum.