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IKTPLUSS-IKT og digital innovasjon

Non-Invasive, Scalable, Algorithmic Automatic Screening of the Digestive System

Awarded: NOK 0.48 mill.

The human digestive system can potentially be affected by one (or more) of many types of diseases. Many of these are in the worst case lethal. There are several ways one can try to detect these, but regularly testing a population is impossible due to high costs, time consumption and lack of enough high quality medical personnel. For example, colon cancer is the third most common cause of cancer mortality for both men and women, and it is a condition where early detection is of clear value for the ultimate survival. As statistics show that 15% of male and female above 50 years are at risk, a screening is recommended on a regular basis. However, a procedure like "bottom-up" colonoscopy examinations is very intrusive for the patient, it requires about 3 man-hours of medical personnel and costs about $1000 per examination. Obviously, this approach does not scale and has extreme costs for a frequent screening of the population above 50 years. The proposed project will therefore perform basic research at the intersection of computer science and medicine. We target a system for a wireless capsule endoscopy, combining multiple types of screenings of the entire digestive system to detect various diseases, to reduce costs and time consumption per patient and patient discomfort. In short, the sensor pill is a small camera which can record a video to visualize the gastrointestinal tract. Our project targets a complete infrastructure including scalable, non-invasive, privacy-preserving transparent data monitoring, collection and storage of screening data from large cohorts, and automatic analysis and detection of various abnormalities in the gastrointestinal tract videos. There exists related work in this area, but there are still large challenges with respect to abnormally detection accuracy (precision and recall), and efficiently scaling of the processing.

Funding scheme:

IKTPLUSS-IKT og digital innovasjon