Brain tumours remain an important cause of morbidity and mortality and afflict an increasing percentage of aging adults with a crude incidence rate of 8 per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe. Diagnosis using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is non-invasive, but only achieves 60-90 % accuracy, depending on the tumour type and grade. The current gold standard classification of a brain tumour by histopathological analysis of biopsy is an invasive surgical procedure and incurs a risk of 2.4-3.5% morbidity and 0.2-0.8% mortality, in addition to healthcare costs and stress to patients.There is a need to improve brain tumour classification, and to provide non-invasive methods for brain tumour diagnosis and prognosis, to aid patient management and treatment.
The HealthAgents project will deliver an opensource web-based DSS which provides hospitals and organisations with a reliable tool to aid in the diagnosis of brain tumours and their prognosis and avoid invasive surgical procedures.
The main objectives of the project are:
- Improve the classification of brain tumours through multi-agent decision support over a distributed network of local databases.
- Develop new pattern recognition methods for a distributed classification and analysis of high-resolution magic angle spinning (HR-MAS) and DNA data.
- Define a method to assess the quality and usability of a new candidate local database containing a set of new cases, based on a quality score.
- Compile, evaluate and use parameters to audit clas¬sifiers and improve them periodically.
- Create the HealthAgents network, a globally distributed brain tumour information and knowledge repository comprising some of the leading European centres of excellence in neuro-oncology.
For further information, please visit:
http://www.healthagents.net
Project co-ordinator:
MicroArt (ES)
Partners:
- MicroArt, SL (ES)
- Universitat de València (ES)
- Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES)
- Instituto de Aplicaciones de las TIC avanzadas (ES)
- Pharma Quality Europe (IT)
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BE)
- University of Birmingham (UK)
- University of Edinburgh (UK)
- University of Southampton (UK)
Timetable: from 01/06 to 12/08
Total cost: 4.106.879
EC funding: 3.791.270
Instrument: STREP
Project Identifier: IST-2004-27214