Introduction
breast cancer
BREAST CANCER
Shared decision-making is a key component of patient-centred health care. This is a process in which the care team, particularly the treating physician and the patient, work together to make decisions on the treatment plans based on clinical evidence and the individual clinical case, while balancing risks and expected outcomes with patient preferences, expectations, moral beliefs, and values [Newly diagnosed breast cancer patients are put in the position of having to make difficult decisions several times during their treatment journey [Current practice for deciding on locoregional therapy and shared decisions varies between centres and may include pictures, drawings, brochures, referral to the centre’s website, and a meeting with a variety of staff members, but it is not uniform and does not consider all the patient’s individual factors. In addition, breast cancer patients who refer to social media or unsupervised websites for information may be subjected to misinformation [Even though locoregional therapy has significantly improved, one third of the patients might have poor aesthetic outcomes, which in turn may also affect patient’s well-being [The CINDERELLA project is based on collaboration between leading breast cancer clinical centres and health industry partners INESC TEC & CANKADO to create an easy-to-use, cost-effective web-based tool for patients and their families to improve the communication with health providers and assist the informed consent process prior to locoregional therapy for breast cancer. As part of the project, the CINDERELLA trial is planned as a prospective multicentre randomized controlled trial [Clinical Trials.gov Identifier 05196269] to evaluate conventional methods for patient education prior to therapy versus an artificial-intelligence cloud-based healthcare platform (CINDERELLA APProach) in breast cancer patients planned for locoregional treatment. The project is supported by the European Union [EU grant HORIZON-HLTH-2021-DISEASE-04-04. HORIZON-RIA. Proposal number 101057389]. The interventional arm will have access to a newly design web-platform (CINDERELLA platform, CINDERELLA APProach), that provides information about the locoregional therapy and the possible aesthetic outcomes (visual with a scale) according to the different type of surgeries the patient was offered. The types of surgeries offered, and patient’s choice will be recorded for both groups. Patients’ expectation and satisfaction with the outcomes will be recorded. We anticipate that the CINDERELLA APProach will improve patient’s expectations and result in greater satisfaction with locoregional therapy outcomes compared to methods currently used in clinical practice.