aGvHDtrackR and cGvHDtrackR: shiny applications for graft versus host disease management and clinical data collection

Abstract

Graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) is one of the most common and troublesome complications after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). Despite adequate GvHD prophylaxis, 30-50% of the patients still develop acute or chronic GvHD, often requiring multiple lines of therapy. Therefore, it is crucial to closely monitor the onset and the response of GvHD to therapies to identify the best available treatment for each patient. Currently, some applications (desktop or mobile) that allow to score GvHD severity at the bedside are available. However, none of the published systems is designed to record ongoing therapies and to upload data in a database, which can support both the clinical decision-making process as well as data collection. To this aim, we developed two Shiny apps: aGvHDtrackR for acute GvHD and cGvHDtrackR for chronic GvHD. These applications record GvHD grading alongside the therapies used for each patient and allow to export of the data in a longitudinal patient-specific database. This is of help for the clinical management of patients and for future multicentric studies on GvHD.