CHIRON INTEGRATED HEALTHCARE APPROACH FOR HOME, MOBILE AND CLINICAL ENVIRONMENTS
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CHIRON and the “image-centric healthcare”

Nowadays healthcare is a image-centred discipline. Medical imaging allows to detect diseases of different kind and advances in digital radiology and other image-based acquisition procedures are making the diagnostic procedure faster and more accurate.
Imaging plays a role in the treatment planning and is at the core of minimally invasive surgical procedure; finally the molecular imaging will be new frontier.

The advance in medicine and the achievement of the objectives of a person-centric healthcare and of a “continuum of care” will be realized only through a synergic and harmonized interaction /cooperation and an advance in all the four paths above identified.
Therefore it is of crucial importance :

  • An advance in medical imaging to allow the medical professionals a better accuracy and an enhanced productivity in their clinical tasks;
  • The development of solutions for the integration of the data available and captured through the analysis of the medical images with all the other data related to the patient and allowing to compose a comprehensive profile of his health status and a risk assessment kept continuously up-to-date.

CHIRON intends to pursue the first of these two approaches with the activities of its work package WP5 and the second one by integrating the outcomes into the WP6 and in the overall CHIRON platform.
Research performed in WP5 will provide to the CHIRON system reliable data of the patient’s health status coming from the automated analysis of image data and from the support given to the doctors for improving the quality and the efficiency of their diagnostic tasks and of their decision process.
In the opposite direction, information from other sources of the CHIRON system will provide WP5 with suitable correcting factors based on the overall health status of the patient. In fact the image-based diagnosis and the subsequent treatment plan could be enriched and made more effective if complemented – in a synergic approach – by specific information related to the clinical profile of the patients and to the latest trend of clinically relevant parameters.
In this approach medical imaging devices / solutions are embedded systems and nodes of an overall healthcare network including sensors and other measurements / monitoring devices and exchanging information to get a comprehensive picture of the health status of the citizen.
In CHIRON we will realize this integration between medical imaging and personal, up-to-date clinical profile of the patient and will maximize the benefit of the use of medical images by adding productivity and accuracy to the interpretation process of the physician.
Even if leaving the final judgement to the doctor, the advanced imaging system developed in the CHIRON project will support him in his decision process through automated systems of image analysis, advanced post-processing techniques for the extraction of quantitative information and through the use of advanced displays and visualization algorithms.
Fast and accurate diagnoses will permit extended screening programs helping to detect diseases in an early stage, before symptoms have occurred. For instance, breast cancer screening programs are widely known to raise the life expectancy of many women. However, breast cancer programs suffer from limited specificity, meaning that many women without disease are detected as risky and are therefore referred for further studies. This leads to unnecessary healthcare expenditures and unnecessary stress in the target groups. Furthermore it is difficult to achieve a suitable compromise between productivity of the radiologist (image interpretation time) and accuracy of the diagnosis (i.e. reduced percentage of false positives or false negatives).

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