Cerebral Aneurysms Database, a New Free Database for Intracranial Aneurysms

Databases are valuable tools allowing the collection and retrieval of relevant patient data. Clinical neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and neuroradiologists treating patients with intracerebral aneurysms can benefit from ad hoc designed tools for the collection and retrieval of clinical and radiological data. In fact, data need be collected to answer clinical questions which cannot be inferred from the literature, such as mortality and morbidity data of aneurysm patients for a specific hospital. Moreover, innumerable research questions cannot be properly addressed without the support of clinical and radiological data collected over time. Standards assuring information accuracy and easy access to the stored data must coexist with the standards that protect an individual’s identifiable health information, particularly with a growing number of patients and diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. This work, describes the design and application of a relational database by a multidisciplinary team of neuroradiologists, neurosurgeons, and neurologists, which can be utilized to manage data from patients with intracranial aneurysms. We discuss the efforts to balance simplicity of access and possibility to share and retrieve data with protection of personal health information (PHI) and the strategies employed to guarantee correctness and completeness of the inserted data.