Comparing predictive models of glioblastoma multiforme built using multi-institutional and local data sources.

The growing amount of electronic data collected from patient care and clinical trials is motivating the creation of national repositories where multiple institutions share data about their patient cohorts. Such efforts aim to provide sufficient sample sizes for data mining and predictive modeling, ultimately improving treatment recommendations and patient outcome prediction. While these repositories offer the potential to improve our understanding of a disease, potential issues need to be addressed to ensure that multi-site data and resultant predictive models are useful to non-contributing institutions.