[Internet-based opportunities in breast cancer diagnostics and research]

A new generation of internet-based diagnostic and research tools have arrived in the last decade. The most extensive group of these includes programs predicting the expected survival mainly by utilizing clinical data of the patient. This includes Adjuvant! Online, the MSKCC and MD Anderson nomograms and the UK-based PREDICT algorithm. A common feature of all these is the comparison of the given patient to previously treated breast cancer samples, and evaluating the clinical outcome of these previous patients. New diagnostic biomarkers can be gene expression or mutation based. Of these, large transcriptomic databases lay the basis for the KMplot.com analysis platform which is capable to assess the prognostic value of a selected gene or gene set. The link between a given mutation and survival is the focus of the cBioportal and the G-2-O software. Diagnosis is based on a transcriptome-level data derived using gene chips in the RecurrenceOnline algorithm. A risk of breast cancer development is assessed by a polygenic model in BOADICEA. In our review we target oncologists, pathologists and breast cancer researchers and provide a comprehensive summary of these and other analysis platforms.