Current developments in ICAI labs: e/MTIC AI Lab
The e/MTIC AI-Lab focuses on improving personalized treatment in healthcare. In this article the lab provides an update of their latest state-of-the-art initiatives: the Health Data Portal and the ‘From Bench to Bedside’ project.
Future diagnostics, treatments and prevention in healthcare are supported by AI systems that are trained by large data sets. This requires a professional and structural approach for a data platform, not only from a functional ICT perspective but also from a non-functional perspective in data and cyber security, privacy, liability, robustness, ownership, access control and many other aspects.
e/MTIC AI works with a unique mixture of industry, clinical partners and researchers to increase the value of AI for clinical practice and improve personalized treatment. The research and innovation, conducted by the five e/MTIC partners, are increasingly ‘data driven’. Breakthrough innovations are based on insights obtained from combining and analyzing data sets from various domains and sources.
e/MTIC Health Data Portal
To safely share the medical data from these multiple institutions, e/MTIC established a scalable collaboration platform called the Health Data Portal (HDP). The e/MTIC HDP is the first health data platform in the Netherlands that will be able to bring together data from different disciplines and institutes to speed up health innovations by facilitating large amounts of data from complementary sources to be stored, shared and researched in a secure, reliable and privacy-respecting way.
This year the e/MTIC HDP has progressed sufficiently to take the next step in the direction of integration in national health infrastructures. With this, it will play an important role in the national network of the Health-RI project, financed by the National Growth Fund.
In practice, with the e/MTIC Health Data portal, PhD students can spend more time on research instead of arranging and collecting data and sorting out all kinds of legal aspects.
From Bench to Bedside
With such solid data infrastructure in place, e/MTIC – Fast track to clinical innovation – takes shape in many projects, amongst which ‘From Bench to Bedside‘. This project focuses on accelerating digital innovation by co-creating in 6 months innovation cycles with a multidisciplinary team (Catharina Hospital, Philips Research and the TU/e).
Newly developed solutions need to have a practical application in healthcare and preferably implemented quickly and as impactfully as possible. However, every innovation has a long journey, from the first idea to a product or a solution. This innovation circle can be reduced considerably by using existing and new data combined with AI. The Bench to Bedside methodology covers 4 phases: identifying clinical requirements, identifying technical requirements, followed by building and testing a proof of concept. These 4 phases come in form of innovation cycles of only six months.
e/MTIC is a large-scale research collaboration between the Catharina Hospital, Maxima Medical Center, Kempenhaeghe Epilepsy and Sleep Center, Eindhoven University of Technology and Philips Eindhoven.