From Medical Image Analysis to Computer-based Personalized Medicine.
Place: Large lecture room
Tomorrow’s healthcare lies in early diagnosis and individually tailored treatments, i.e. delivering the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. This patient-centred approach to medicine, the so-called personalized medicine, has been embraced as a vital societal challenge in the European Union (EU), with the active participation of researchers, medical professionals, health-related industries, and policy makers In this context, significant efforts have been dedicated to the development of novel cutting-edge technological solutions to enable personalized medicine to fully realize its promise in the European clinic. Medical imaging is expected to play an important role in the personalized medicine revolution due to its unique capability to capture in vivo the most subtle structural and functional changes in diseased organs. In this talk, I will present three examples of EU-funded funded projects that illustrate the potential of medical image analysis and computer science in tomorrow’s personalized medicine. These projects cover three different organs systems, namely the heart (euHeart project), the spine (MySpine), and the carotid artery (DECARTS), but also three different applications of medicine, i.e. diagnosis estimation, risk assessment, and treatment selection. I will also discuss the need for further efforts in research, as well as for cultural changes in healthcare practice to translate these advances into clinical practice.