Project description
A computer-based analytical tool to diagnose brain diseases
Diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is undertaken by physicians who are required to evaluate multiple tests and medical images. The subjective nature of these interpretations often leads to misdiagnosis, especially at the early stages of the disease. The mission of the EU-funded Neurocloud project is to improve the diagnosis of brain diseases. To achieve this, researchers have generated a novel algorithm that allows the fast analysis and comparison of multiple medical images. The project is supporting the feasibility assessment of this diagnostic process and exploring its commercialisation prospects.
Objective
One of the main socioeconomics challenges to be faced in the next decades will be the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) due to population ageing. Today, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of such illness is complex, a laborious process completed by a limited set of Neurologist experts who need to manually process and compare images from multiple Brain medical imaging systems (MRI, PET and SPECT). While early detection is the key to reduce costs and impact of the diseases, they are routinely under-diagnosed by up to 60-80% in the very early stages. One of the main weaknesses of the diagnostic process is the physician’s visual assessment due to the current subjective interpretation of complex images.
Qubiotech was created in 2014, with a mission to radically speed-up and improve brain diseases diagnostic work flow. Spun off from the University Hospital of Santiago de Compostela and based on a novel algorithm for fast composite multimodal and quantitative analysis of medical images. We have a product that can forge a new way to do things. Rapidly increasing diagnosis speeds whilst lowering costs, our aim is to overhaul patient treatment in this critical sector.
We now want to finalise the feasibility assessment for our entire product roadmap whilst confirming that we have everything in place to achieve the detected opportunity. Aside from helping to alleviate the incoming ageing societal challenge, we aim to plant our company as the European leader of a new sector and drive revenues of 15.5M€ by 2022.
Fields of science
- medical and health scienceshealth scienceshealth care serviceseHealth
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineneurologyepilepsy
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineneurologydementiaalzheimer
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineneurologyparkinson
- engineering and technologymedical engineeringdiagnostic imaging
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
15001 A Coruna
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.