Process mining in oncology: A literature review

Process mining, an emerging data analytics method, has been used effectively in various healthcare contexts including oncology, the study of cancer. Cancer is a complex disease with many complicated care requirements and there is an urgent need to improve the cost and clinical effectiveness of cancer care pathways. Process mining of the e-health records of cancer patients may play an important future role and this paper presents a literature review of process mining in oncology as a contribution to this research. The search produced 758 articles which were manually reviewed by title, abstract, and full paper text review to develop the original pool of papers. An in-depth ancestor search was used to gather additional articles from the references of the original pool. These steps resulted in 37 papers. Through a thematic review process, the papers were analysed and five themes emerged. These were: 1) process and data types; 2) research questions; 3) techniques, perspectives and tools; 4) methodologies; 5) limitations and future work. This review can: (i) highlight the potential value of process mining for improving cancer care processes (ii) provide a useful overview of the current work undertaken; (iii) help researchers to choose process mining algorithms, techniques, tools, methodologies and approaches; and (iv) identify research opportunities in this new field of study.