Project implementation

The project plan is divided into a seven technical work packages, supplemented by the Management, to allow focusing on a set of specific innovative aspects in each of the work packages.

WP1-MANAGE will carry out the tasks related to consortium, grant and project management. Providing information gathering on breast cancer research and existing related technologies, WP2-EXPLORE explores the needs defining the requirements, architecture, format, protocols and interfaces for the system. These segments cover the advanced characterization through image algorithms (WP3-ANALYSE), the models implementation and adaptation (WP4-MODEL), the decision support system (WP5-DECIDE) and the final integrated system (WP6-INTEGRATE). WP7-VALIDATE demonstrate and validate the end-to-end workflow to show that the results from DESIREE serve the needs of the medical community as determined in WP2. Finally, WP8-DISSEMINATE will take the innovative results from the project and seek to influence standardization by disseminating the results, but, most importantly, by creating a community of early adopters. This process will be facilitated by means of user involvement to proof the professional user community and the definition of an exploitation roadmap.

Work packages

Wp Work Package Title Leader Duration
1 MANAGE - Coordination and management Vicomtech-IK4 MI-M36
2 EXPLORE - Information gathering Eresa M1-M5
3 ANALYSE - Image-based breast and tumor characterization Ulster University M6-M26
4 MODEL - Predictive Modelling University of Houston M6-M29
5 DECIDE - Decision Support and Knowledge Discovery Vicomtech-IK4 M6-M26
6 INTEGRATE -  System Integration, User Interfaces and Visual Analytics Bilbomática M6-M28  
7 VALIDATE - Clinical Validation

Inserm-Limics

M3-M36
8 DISSEMINATE - Dissemination and Explotation Arivis M1-M36
       

The main objectives of this work package are to coordinate management activities and requirements of the overall project and to ensure that the project plan is respected, meets its objectives within budget and scheduled timescales. It will provide the overall technical, administrative and consortium management for the project.

The main objective of this WP is to analyse the different data and information sources that will be involved in and will fed the DESIREE system (e.g. clinical, imaging, genetic, biological). A common interface will be defined for the feeding of such information. As a result of the WP, the Breast Cancer Digital Patient Model (DPM) will be developed.

The objective of this work package is to implement the necessary tools for personalized structural and functional feature extraction from medical images. These tools will extract valuable information for diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and follow-up from the heterogeneous set of image data that will be used in the project. Apart from its direct inherent quantitative or qualitative value, the extracted image-based information will be used to feed the models in WP4 and the DSS in WP5. The set of algorithms developed in this WP will be integrated in the web-based software system developed in WP6, as interactive visualization tools that display the results of the analysis as well as cloud-based implementations.

The objective of this work package is to implement adapted, scalable and refined versions of existing models for breast cancer diagnostic, evolution and prognosis. Breast Conservative Therapy (BCT) and Radio-Biological (RB) models will be implemented from consortium members‘ previous work and optimized with inputs of other WPs in order to deliver consistent and accurate outcomes. These outcomes will be used either in a standalone way or as inputs for the decision support system developed in WP5.

The objectives of this work package are the development and implementation of a powerful knowledge-based Clinical Decision Support System (k-CDSS) for breast cancer, that: (i) supports clinicians during the gathering of patient data; (ii) implements clinical guidelines as a baseline knowledge base for k-CDSS, together with an Authoring Tool that allows the user to edit their institution specific guidelines; (iii) provides decision recommendations, which will be a set of options for a certain decision ranked and accompanied by the corresponding evidence; (iv) provides tools for querying former cases in order to find similar patients (cases), based on the DBCP developed in WP2 and adequate similarity metrics; (v) implements a case based reasoning system that manages a case base of former patients; and (vi) formalizes decisions into a structure that allows the reasoning over the whole decisional history.

The objective of this work package is the design and implementation of an intuitive and ergonomic system for the management and the visualization of all the information gathered and generated within the project. This WP will tackle the specification of functional requirements, technical requirements, and the general architecture of the system. Databases and GUIs will be integrated, to allow the storage, retrieval and visualization of the required patient data, for diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. Powerful data mining and visual analytics tools will enable the direct access to the critical patient information.

The final aim of the platform is to assist medical personnel in their daily practice coordination and case management and to achieve individualized and optimized therapy for breast cancer. The validation will be both quantitative and qualitative. It will use different metrics and feedback, based on comparison with gold standards, current practice and questionnaires. Predictive models will be tested against real outcomes when feasible. Recommendations issued by the system will be compared with current practice and discrepancies will be analysed.

The objective of this work package is to assure a fruitful exploitation of DESIREE system and technologies once the project has finished, providing an exploitation strategy and the growth potential.