The EU-funded AI4LUNGS project team is using artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionise respiratory health. Its achievements will lead to faster and more accurate diagnoses resulting in more personalised treatment plans for patients with respiratory diseases. One year after its launch in January 2024, the project has already made considerable progress in creating innovative digital tools to help doctors make decisions during the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. “Our mission is to create a virtual replica to help doctors in their daily practice, in particular with regard to respiratory conditions,” says Hélder P. Oliveira, principal investigator at INESC TEC, the Portuguese research organisation responsible for coordinating AI4LUNGS, in a press release. “Our goal is to develop AI algorithms that improve the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment using the same data that doctors already rely on, and thus provide them with additional information to make better decisions.
Respiratory diseases are a major health problem, severely affecting hundreds of millions of people each year and causing millions of deaths worldwide. Understanding the symptoms and diagnosing the disease, a long and expensive process that affects the outcome, requires a whole range of examinations and tests. Duarte Dias, a biomedical engineer at INESC TEC, explains how the project can help assess patients’ health risk in the case of lung cancer: “This research is pioneering in its ability to support the process of lung cancer stratification, which is essential in the fight against this devastating disease.
Stakeholder participation
AI4LUNGS has also launched a stakeholder forum to ensure that the tools that are developed are aligned with the real needs of patients, clinicians and healthcare systems across Europe. Since patients bear the daily burden of being sick, receiving treatment and dealing with the healthcare system, their views are essential to designing effective, patient-centred technologies. They can even point to problems that researchers or policy makers might underestimate.
Doctors, nurses, health managers and public health officials can provide valuable information on how to articulate new solutions in existing systems. This is an important consideration, particularly in the European Union, where health systems vary widely between countries. In addition, involving policy makers, health regulators and legal experts in project planning from the outset can help to avoid obstacles related to EU policies and regulations later on.
“Innovative ideas in healthcare are exciting, but they have to work in real life. By involving healthcare stakeholders, we can better understand how new solutions will fit into healthcare systems and improve patient care,” says Emma Tsai, communications manager at Future Needs, the project’s Cypriot partner. She adds: “The forum is open to stakeholders from across the healthcare sector, and interested individuals are invited to find out more and apply to participate via the project website.
AI4LUNGS (AI-BASED PERSONALISED CARE FOR RESPIRATORY DISEASE USING MULTI-MODAL DATA IN PATIENT STRATIFICATION) clinical partners have also submitted their clinical study proposals to the ethics committees for approval. Clinical data collection will begin once these proposals are approved, bringing the project one step closer to creating its novel AI-assisted tools.
More information: CORDIS
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