PIC was the European ITN that trained the cohort of 15 innovation leaders able to articulate and materialise the vision of a Personalised In-silico Cardiology (PIC). It addressed the specific challenges originated by cultural and structural barriers between sectors and disciplines, articulating a fluent dialogue and work between clinicians and engineers. PIC has defined a new area of research and set the vision of how the digital twin is the pathway towards precision medicine in cardiovascular medicine.
The barriers between sectors were opened through the personal mutual trust built both among the PIC fellows and the supervisors. Sharing the vision of the Personalised In-silico Cardiology was the main enabler to bring the sectors and disciplines together. The main success indicator of the quality of the training was the external recognition received by fellows in scientific meetings, with a solid track of publications and awards. Publications also reflect the tight collaboration among academic, clinical, industrial, and regulatory partners – our white paper titled “The digital twin to enable the vision of precision cardiology” [1], integrating all beneficiaries of the consortium in the major journal in the field of cardiology, was the main exponent of this collaboration. There are several pieces of evidence of the lasting collaboration among the beneficiaries. The pillars of mutual trust, the complementarity between beneficiaries, and the collaborative spirit built by the network, led to the “Cardiovascular Digital Twin” Doctoral Training proposal, submitted last November 2021.
The main outreach events were our three international Summer Schools, one in Oslo, one in Barcelona and last one online due to Covid restrictions, hitting attendance numbers much larger than we ever expected (around 50 and 150 in the physical and online versions respectively), and thus creating a unique opportunity for our fellows and other researchers to network with word leaders in the area of computational cardiology. These events were very useful to articulate synergies with “sister Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions”, such as AFibNet (g.a. 675351), CardioFunXion (g.a. 642676) or PersonaliseAF (g.a. 860974).
With respect to exploitable results the work of PIC fellows hosted in industrial beneficiaries has directly contributed to their products and services (enhanced prediction of risks in the planning of valve surgeries in FEOPS, a new concept for pacemaker sensing and monitoring in Medtronic, and the automation of workflow and analysis in the quantification of echocardiographic scans in GE). PIC fellows hosted in academic beneficiaries have generated ideas and tools with exploitation potential, such as the prediction of risks after an infarct based on the spatio-temporal 3D analysis of the heartbeat captured in an MRI, or the use of mobile phones as a digital stethoscope to screen and detect the presence of cardiac disease.
