Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BRAINTEASER (BRinging Artificial INTelligencE home for a better cAre of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and multiple SclERosis)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-01-01 bis 2021-12-31
BRAINTEASER is a 48 months project that started on January 1st 2021, co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research (grant agreement No 101017598) under the domain of the Health, demographic change and well-being. The BRAINTEASER Project driven by 11 partners from 6 European countries.
BRAINTEASER aims to integrate societal, environmental and health data to develop patient stratification and disease progression models for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). ALS and MS are two very complex degenerative neurological diseases, but with very different clinical picture, evolution, prognosis and therapies. Common features are that both these chronic diseases affect the nervous system and progressively modify the quality of life of the patients and their families in a significant way.
BRAINTEASER will integrate large clinical datasets with novel patient-generated and environmental data collected using low-cost sensors and apps.
The collected data will allow the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools able to address the current needs of precision medicine, enabling early risk prediction of disease fast progression and adverse events.
Technical solutions developed within the project will follow agile and user-centered approaches, accounting for the technical, medical, psychological and societal needs of the specific users.
The system developed in BRAINTEASER will provide quantitative evidence of benefits and effectiveness of using AI in health-care pathways, implementing a proof-of-concept of their use in real clinical setting. Outcomes from the project will also provide a coherent and integrated set of recommendations for public health authorities. BRAINTEASER will support the transition of current healthcare approaches from reactive to predictive, paving the path for patients toward a healthier and more fulfilling life as long as possible.
BRAINTEASER main goals can be summarized as follows:
- To investigate and model ALS and MS progression for patients, who demand to plan their future and being assisted in their daily needs, and for clinicians, who need to deepen disease understanding to personalise patients’ treatment and prevent adverse events and fast disease progression,
- To enforce the advantage of using AI models to augment current clinical approaches by introducing innovative descriptors of clinical outcomes, integrating and managing multidimensional datasets, stratifying patients and characterizing the disease evolution to design personalized health and care pathways,
- To enforce the use of AI models in hospital, home-care and in research, adopting an open science paradigm that makes scientific research results accessible to all levels of society, at the same time respecting the privacy and patients’ data ownership, and actively involving end users in the technological solution co-design, implementation and commercialization to make sure the project’s results will soundly respond to real needs.
BRAINTEASER aims to integrate societal, environmental and health data to develop patient stratification and disease progression models for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). ALS and MS are two very complex degenerative neurological diseases, but with very different clinical picture, evolution, prognosis and therapies. Common features are that both these chronic diseases affect the nervous system and progressively modify the quality of life of the patients and their families in a significant way.
BRAINTEASER will integrate large clinical datasets with novel patient-generated and environmental data collected using low-cost sensors and apps.
The collected data will allow the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools able to address the current needs of precision medicine, enabling early risk prediction of disease fast progression and adverse events.
Technical solutions developed within the project will follow agile and user-centered approaches, accounting for the technical, medical, psychological and societal needs of the specific users.
The system developed in BRAINTEASER will provide quantitative evidence of benefits and effectiveness of using AI in health-care pathways, implementing a proof-of-concept of their use in real clinical setting. Outcomes from the project will also provide a coherent and integrated set of recommendations for public health authorities. BRAINTEASER will support the transition of current healthcare approaches from reactive to predictive, paving the path for patients toward a healthier and more fulfilling life as long as possible.
BRAINTEASER main goals can be summarized as follows:
- To investigate and model ALS and MS progression for patients, who demand to plan their future and being assisted in their daily needs, and for clinicians, who need to deepen disease understanding to personalise patients’ treatment and prevent adverse events and fast disease progression,
- To enforce the advantage of using AI models to augment current clinical approaches by introducing innovative descriptors of clinical outcomes, integrating and managing multidimensional datasets, stratifying patients and characterizing the disease evolution to design personalized health and care pathways,
- To enforce the use of AI models in hospital, home-care and in research, adopting an open science paradigm that makes scientific research results accessible to all levels of society, at the same time respecting the privacy and patients’ data ownership, and actively involving end users in the technological solution co-design, implementation and commercialization to make sure the project’s results will soundly respond to real needs.
During this first year, the project efforts were focused on getting a comprehensive view of the final user needs and context, as well as the data, including retrospective clinical datasets and environmental retrospective data. Actions were also centred in the development of the first release of the infrastructure for data collection based on the requirements. Efforts brought to bear the ground for the identification of different AI models for prediction of disease progression and stratification of ALS and MS. Finally, setting the grounds for an open science approach and designing and developing a first version of the BRAINTEASER ontology, able to model retrospective data for both ALS and MS. All this complemented with a strong dissemination and communication plan to expand the concept, technologies and activities being developed within the project.
BRAINTEASER will provide the MS and ALS patients, and those who take care of them the possibility to monitor the progress of the disease, and to have automatic feedback in case of need to contact the doctor outside the established routine, thus empowering patients to better manage their health providing digital health service (prognosis, prevention, assistance). The AI tools that are being developed will allow a better prognosis thanks to: a) the integration of clinical data with genetic data, environmental data, sensor data and self-reported questionnaires; b) a better stratification of the patients based on the dynamics of phenotypic manifestations; c) a different perspective of the prediction tools, which allow a description over time and within a range of probabilities with respect to the progress of the disease. Moreover, BRAINTEASER will allow clinicians making decisions bearing in mind the global context of the patient's progress, and their general health, as well as their socio-economic situation, since all this information is integrated in the models. The open science approach will provide a single coherent, machine and human processable, searchable, re-usable and exploitable asset beyond the consortium itself and lasting also after the end of the project.