FP7 eHealth Projects

The project GAP focuses on the area of "Patient safety and risk assessment" of the challenge 5 of FP7-ICT. It addresses, via specific workshops and studies, all aspects of risk prediction, evaluation of risk factors, evaluation and management tools designed for the preparation of means that allows an intervention in real situations.

Despite tremendous advances in modern imaging technology, both early detection and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer are still unresolved challenges. Today, a variety of imaging modalities and image-guided biopsy procedures exist to identify and characterize morphology and function of suspicious breast tissue. However, a clinically feasible solution for breast imaging, which is both highly sensitive and specific with respect to breast cancer, is still missing.

HeartCycle consortium, comprising 18 research, academic, industrial and medical organizations from 9 different European countries and China, will work to improve the quality of life for coronary heart disease and heart failure patients by monitoring their condition and involving them in the daily management of their disease. The consortium will also develop mechanisms to automatically report relevant monitoring data back to clinicians so that they can prescribe personalized therapies and lifestyle recommendations.

IMPPACT (Image-based multi-scale physiological planning for ablation cancer treatment) will develop an intervention planning and monitoring application for Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA) of malignant liver tumours. RFA is a minimally invasive form to treat cancer without open surgery, by placing a needle inside the malignancy and destroying it through intensive heating.

Access to medical care is sometimes very difficult to be reached from people living in rural and underserved areas. This problem is very well known in rural areas in Latin America. Citizens have no access to health care. They have to travel hundred of kilometres to receive a medical diagnosis.

Medicine is undergoing a revolution that is transforming the nature of healthcare from reactive to preventive. The changes are catalyzed by a new systems approach to disease which focuses on integrated diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease in individuals. This will replace our current mode of medicine over the coming years with a personalized predictive treatment. While the goal is clear, the path is fraught with challenges. P-medicine brings together international leaders in their fields to create an infrastructure that will facilitate this translation from current practice to personalized medicine. In achieving this objective p-medicine has formulated a coherent, integrated work plan for the design, development, integration and validation of technologically challenging areas of today. Our emphasis is on formulating an open, modular framework of tools and services, so that p-medicine can be adopted gradually, including efficient secure sharing and handling of large personalized data sets, enabling demanding Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) multi-scale simulations (in silico oncology), building standards-compliant tools and models for VPH research, drawing on the VPH Toolkit and providing tools for large-scale, privacy-preserving data and literature mining, a key component of VPH research. We will ensure that privacy, non-discrimination, and access policies are aligned to maximize protection of and benefit to patients. The p-medicine tools and technologies will be validated within the concrete setting of advanced clinical research. Pilot cancer trials have been selected based on clear research objectives, emphasising the need to integrate multilevel datasets, in the domains of Wilms tumour, breast cancer and leukaemia. To sustain a self-supporting infrastructure realistic use cases will be built that will demonstrate tangible results for clinicians. The project is clinically driven and promotes the principle of open source and open standards.

For further information, please visit:
http://www.p-medicine.eu

Project co-ordinator:
Universität des Saarlandes

Partners:

• CUSTODIX NV
• THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
• SWISS INSTITUTE OF BIOINFORMATICS
• ECANCERMEDICALSCIENCE AG
• NATIONAL UNIVERSITY CORPORATION HOKKAIDO UNIVERSITY
• INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS
• A. PERSIDIS & SIA OE
• GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ UNIVERSITAET HANNOVER
• HEINRICH-HEINE-UNIVERSITAET DUESSELDORF
• UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE MADRID
• IBM ISRAEL - SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY LTD
• FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS
• FRAUNHOFER-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FOERDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG E.V
• PHILIPS ELECTRONICS NEDERLAND B.V.
• UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
• EUROPEAN RESEARCH AND PROJECT OFFICE GMBH
• CHRISTIAN-ALBRECHTS-UNIVERSITAET ZU KIEL
• INSTYTUT CHEMII BIOORGANICZNEJ PAN
• ISTITUTO EUROPEO DI ONCOLOGIA SRL

Timetable: from 01/2011 to 01/2015

Total cost: € 18.480.000

EC funding: € 13.330.000

Programme Acronym: FP7-ICT

Subprogramme Area: ICT-2009.5.3 Virtual Physiological Human

Contract type: Collaborative project (generic)

Related news articles:

• New Potential Personalized Medicine Platform
• p-medicine - From Data Sharing and Integration via VPH Models to Personalized Medicine

In 2006, over 45.000 European citizens died of cirrhosis of the liver and 44,000 additional citizens of liver cancer, knowing that the same year 48,700 new liver cancer cases were declared. Surgical procedures remain the options that offer the foremost success rate against such pathologies. Regretfully, surgery is not so frequent due to several limitations.

The PHS2020 project goal is to produce a RTD roadmap on ICT supported Personal Health Systems identifying emerging technologies and potential applications, taking into account users demands, business aspects, ethical and legal considerations. The Personal Health Systems (PHS) roadmap project aims at identifying and characterizing the key research challenges to be addressed during FP7 and beyond in order to deliver the promises of PHS integrated by an action oriented implementation plan describing the timing and instruments to be deployed to support the most important future research themes.

Many drugs fail to reach the market because of side effects on the heart. The principal objective of this proposal is to create an advanced computational technology for in silico assessment of the efficacy and safety of specific drugs [ICT-2007.5.3(c) (3)], i.e. an open environment comprising validated computational models, tools and numerical methods that will enable simulations of drug actions on the electrophysiology of the human heart.

Dementia causes long and oppressive suffering to patients and their relatives and imposes enormous costs on society. About 25 million people suffered from dementia in 2000. As a 4-fold increase of this number is expected by 2050, dementia is one main health issue of the next decades.