EU-funded ICT tool to help patients with brain trauma
13 Jun 2014 12:46 PM
An EU-funded project
– with partners in Finland, France, Lithuania and the UK – is
collecting data from hundreds of patients who have suffered brain trauma and
using it to build software which will improve diagnosis and predict the outcome
of treatments.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI)
occurs when a sudden trauma causes damage to the brain. It is the most common
cause of permanent disability in people under the age of 40 years and the
incidence of TBIs has been increasing over the last years, in Europe and
worldwide.
The right treatment in the
crucial hours following the accident can make all the difference. But diagnosis
can be very difficult given the complex nature of the brain and the individual
nature of each injury. Researchers from the TBICARE @TBIcare project are developing a tool combining various
databases and system simulation. This tool will allow doctors to enter data
from tests in the emergency department and will predict the most effective
course of treatment for each individual patient.
Dr Mark van
Gils, TBICARE’s scientific coordinator, explains that under the
project "patients are tested for many different things when they
arrive at an emergency department. The care team would look at their awareness
and reactivity, and at how much oxygen is in their blood, for example.
They also explore the potential of more sophisticated measurements
– for example testing for proteins that indicate different types of
damage to the patient's brain tissue in their circulation, and using
imaging to look for internal bleeding. We want to see which tests give the best
indicators of the patient’s likely
outcome."
Vice-President of the European
Commission @NeelieKroesEU, responsible for the Digital
Agenda, says: "I am proud that EU funds help
researchers develop digital tools that can save lives. This
project also shows the power of data in solving real-life
problems".
€3 million of EU funding
has been invested in TBICARE. The project is part of a wider drive –
the Virtual Physiological Human Initiative –
to use ICT to help clinicians diagnose and treat conditions more effectively.
ICT tools pool existing but fragmented data and knowledge on the human body and
can be used to model outcomes.
Read the TBICARE story (also in French, German,
Italian, Polish and Spanish).