Capstone Part1

-Capstone Project Part1-

Computer Science students at ASU are required to take a 2-semester capstone course where the primary objective is completing a major software project for a local sponsor. My capstone team consists of 6 members and we are going to be re-engineering an application called PatientView for the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ that is used in cancer research. As the project gets under way until its completion I plan to post updates about what programming languages, tools, and teamwork strategies we are employing. This is an exciting project that has real-world application and I am extremely excited to help produce an excellent product!

The plan is to use Python 2.7 with a Django framework and deploy it on AWS. JavaScript will likley be used as well in some capacity.

Here is a sample of what I wrote for part for the project proposal that gives a better idea of what the capstone project is:

“As humankind accelerates through the Information Age, new technological heights in medicine seem to be summited with increasing frequency. However, the specter of cancer remains a dangerous and resilient adversary. Cancer evolution, structural variation, and immune system evasion all contribute to the difficulty of treating the disease (Warner, 2015). Storing data related to cancer research has become instrumental in the search to understand and ultimately eradicate cancer. The Mayo Clinic, a medical practice and medical research group, maintains one such repository called PatientView.

The Mayo Clinic operates a National Cancer Institute center in Scottsdale, Arizona where The Translational Innovations in Mathematical Medicine and Surgery (TIMMS) Lab is located. The TIMMS Lab utilizes the web-based application PatientView to store patient-based image, measurement, pathology, and treatment data for use in cancer research. At present, the TIMMS Lab focuses on glioblastomas, an “aggressive, highly invasive, and neurologically destructive tumor considered to be among the deadliest of human cancers” (Maher, 2001). The TIMMS Lab would like to further develop PatientView to include other types of cancers and perhaps even non-cancer pathologies. Currently, however, PatientView is not in a state where it can be easily expanded as additions may require different data than what is currently supported by the model.

The current version of PatientView was developed over a decade ago using PHP, JavaScript, and a MySQL backend database. A number of adjunct functions written in Java also exist that are connected to the main application through sockets. It will be the job of the ‘PatientView Team’ to re-engineer the application using Python 2.7 and the Django web framework. Work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure will be employed to improve consistency and security. The critical objective of the project is to create a modern PatientView application with all of the functionality of the original and with future upgrades, flexibility, and expandability in mind.”