Surgical Reporting Instrument Designed to Improve Outcome Data in Head and Neck Cancer Trials

Abstract

Precise reporting of surgical staging and operative data in multi-institutional protocol studies could provide a number of benefits: 1) fewer cases would be discarded because of inadequate data, 2) staff review time would be reduced, 3) there would be assurance that participating surgeons were performing similar operations on similar tumors, 4) the resulting precision in stratification should improve the likelihood of achieving accurate comparison of the treatment options under study, and 5) by comparing the surgical parameters with local-regional control of disease, the specific factors that have a statistically significant correlation with outcome could be identified. This paper presents a computer-based, anatomically oriented reporting instrument that should improve the reliability of surgical data available to multi-institutional protocols.