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I am writing a scientific paper on how a cancer staging system may be improved. However, I am a non-native English speaker, and I am concerned that my current title reflects that too much.

Please, how may this sentence be rephrased or improved to encapsulate the meaning in a more elegant way?

Approaching a more patient-tailored N-staging of x cancer

Specifically, it is the a more part I do not like. In my research paper, I have evaluated three commonly applied approaches to cancer staging and introduced a new approach that includes specific patient parameters to a greater extent than seen in the previous approaches.

Thank you in advance. Best.

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  • You should understand "a more patient-tailored X" as "An X that is more tailored towards patients than earlier [treatments]" -- To tailor to/towards <noun> = to design so as to fit or suit <noun>. -- "More" = to a greater extent"
    – Greybeard
    Mar 26, 2020 at 10:10
  • It sounds fine to me as it is. My degrees are in chemistry. Perhaps 'A more patient-tailored approach to an N-staging treatment of x cancer' is modest enough (the use of 'approach'); you need to decide on accuracy. Don't worry about 'a more patient-tailored': fine in a paper, but avoid it in the pub. Oh, we're avoiding the pub anyway.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Mar 26, 2020 at 12:44

2 Answers 2

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In my opinion "more" itself remains usable and useful.

Possibly the lack of idiomaticity felt in that title comes from the term "approaching". This title might sound sharper once this word is replaced by "towards" (without doing away with the word "more"), a usual introductory preposition for titles in newspapers anyway, while using the plural of "N-staging".

  • Towards more patient-tailored N-stagings for x cancer
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I would suggest

Toward an N-staging idiopathic treatment of x cancer

An idiopathic disease is

any disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin.

and

approximately "a disease of its own kind"

I have read in scientific papers that breast cancers are idiopathic, and require individualized treatments, as opposed to a generic treatment.

Similar uses of idiopathic treatment may be found in:

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