A. Data Acquisition and Unified Representation
The project focused on the definition and implementation of a unified schema (Figure 1), dictating the representation of various data sources in the form of the iASiS Knowledge Graph (KG), allowing for dissimilar data integration and high-level analysis. The final KG version comprised 766,498,457 facts (RDF triples) and 222,946,082 nodes, including the following data for the two disease use cases (lung cancer and dementia):
-Approximately 4,000 patient Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
-More than 250,000 of PubMed publications, analysed with Natural Language Processing techniques
-Data from more than 10 genomic and phenotypical datasets
-Data from online databases (DrugBank, SIDER, KEGG) and ontologies (UMLS, OBO, HBO, ICD10, HUGO)
B. Development of the iASiS Platform Prototype
The final iASiS platform prototype provides a user-friendly environment that manages aggregated data and presents analysis’ results and statistics. Iit allows the user (clinician or health policy maker) to focus quickly on the individual case or a subset of patients that seem of particular interest, in order to support personalised medical decisions.
C. Analysis Modules
Through iASiS platform, end-users are provided with a set of analysis modules that can be used for decision making in personalised medicine. These modules provide descriptive (Figure 2) and predictive analytics (Figure 3), multi-variate analysis (Figure 4) of patients, 3D CT image investigations (Figure 5), a Question-Answering mechanism (Figure 6) allowing for free text questions to be answered from latest literature, as well as Literature Investigation (Figure 7).
D. User Evaluation
The usability of iASiS platform was guaranteed through the continuous involvement of expert users in all stages of the development process, providing useful feedback and suggestions. Also, an international Advisory Board of experts was formed, providing guidance and useful feedback to the project technical team.
Two rounds of pilot evaluation were performed for both use cases in different periods of the project, involving 96 clinicians and policy makers from various centres (Overall experience rating in Figures 8 and 9).
E. Data Privacy
To ensure the project follows the highest ethical standards and is in line with all EU and National legislation, an Ethics Committee was established, with representatives from all key partners. The committee monitored all data-related activities throughout the project, resulting in two iterative reports. Detailed data management plans were developed for both use cases and an internal audit for data assets and processing activities was performed by all partners to ensure compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
F. Exploitation and Dissemination
An exploitation plan for all project assets has been submitted, including also competitor analysis and partners' individual exploitation plans. Two patent applications have been submitted based on iASiS results (Drug-drug interactions and Linguistic Risk Assessment) and a spin-off company has been created (LangAware).
Remarkable effort has been made to reach out to the communities of big data and personalised medicine, as well as the medical communities of the two diseases. The iASiS website has been the project’s main channel for sharing information, along with social media, eNewsletters and project brochures, distributed at several events. A professional showcase video was created and made available on the project website:
https://project-iasis.eu/node/187(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie).
iASiS established an annual workshop (BDPM), through which synergies with all 6 same-call projects have been achieved, and has produced 58 scientific publications in scientific conferences and journals.
