Project description
Predictive diagnostic platform for motor/cognitive impairments in premature newborns
Premature birth increases the risk for an altered neurodevelopment in childhood and adolescence, and many surviving children face a lifetime of disability. Early diagnostics of brain injury and early detection of impairments are necessary to improve the well-being of children, improving developmental monitoring, medical evaluation and optimization of the therapeutic options. The EU-funded PARENT project envisions a multidisciplinary approach to develop diagnostic, predictive platforms focused on newborn motor/cognitive impairments, and training programs for early-stage researchers. The project aims to create a software infrastructure of integrated databases, validated algorithms components and platforms built upon them. PARENT combines the efforts of a multidisciplinary network of 10 leading European research groups together with industry partners, pediatric hospitals, and parents’ associations to train 15 early-stage researchers.
Objective
Prematurity exponentially increases the risk for an altered neurodevelopmental outcomes in childhood and adolescence. Many survivors children, face a lifetime of disability. Despite the advances in neonatal care have greatly improved survival of preterm born infants even at extremely low gestational ages we are now at a period of steadiness where no further improvement in long-term neurodevelopmental outcome is seen. The impact of these sequelae affects not only at a personal and familiar level but also poses a significant burden on society. Early diagnostics of brain injury and/or brain dysmaturation as well as early detection of impairments are important strategies to improve the well-being of children and their families allowing for developmental monitoring and medical evaluation of the specific type of disorder that affects a child and optimize therapeutics options.
In this context, PARENT is a vision for a multidisciplinary approach to develop diagnostic and predictive platforms focused on newborn motor/cognitive impairments. PARENT will make a critical contribution towards an open neurodevelopmental disease diagnostic software infrastructure by interlinking disciplines from clinical data, neuroimaging collection and processing, biomarkers, data fusion, machine learning applied to clinical data, novel prediction algorithms.
To best leverage the data potential, PARENT envisions an easy-to-use software infrastructure which provides integrated databases, validated algorithms components and platforms built upon them. This vision can be included in the more general paradigm of evidence-based medicine, personalized medicine and patient center care, as well as decision support systems in clinical field.
PARENT combines the efforts of a multidisciplinary network of 10 leading European research groups, industry partners, pediatric hospitals and parents’ association to develop a technological infrastructure that will train 15 Early Stage Researchers.
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Coordinator
10129 Torino
Italy