An integrative ICT platform for personalized medicine

The vision of VIRTMED is to advance ICT concepts and methods in order to develop models and tools for personalized medicine, based on the integration of heterogeneous types of complex information from multiple sources into an efficient form that easily can be used by medical doctors to reinforce and develop their clinical decisions. At the core of the project is the research and development of a new ICT platform for integration and visualization of multimodal-sourced images and biomedical data. Such a platform is strongly warranted in the area of personalized cancer diagnostics, treatment and follow-up, but related needs permeate the health sector and beyond. Research challenges include: Software reliability, robustness and security of such a platform and related applications. Flexible user interface solutions accommodated to empower the users (clinicians) to make qualified diagnostic decisions or treatment choices. Adaptive capacity of the platform to embed emerging technologies currently not implemented in the clinic. Meta-modelling and integration of data from varied sources (e.g. magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS), ultrasound, mass spectrometry imaging (MSI), PET, molecular analyses of targeted biopsies on the genetic, proteomic and metabolic level, and clinical parameters and metadata), with vast differences in category or spatial and temporal resolution. Actual models, structural and functional, for the cancer challenges we are targeting. Tools for analysis and exploration of data, using visualization as well as statistics and machine learning on multivariate data. Adequate database solutions and approaches to "Big data"-handling. The resulting platform and applications will help the health system identify optimal strategies for early diagnosis, treatment and follow-up, including development of improved biomarkers.