EU-hankkeet EN - 2021 Husinvuosi

Our researchers are increasingly participating in extensive international research, development and innovation projects financed wholly with EU funding.

In 2021, EU Horizon 2020 funding was granted to six major projects in which HUS is involved. The objectives of these projects include harnessing artificial intelligence and digital technologies for health care and devising solutions for individual and preventive health care.

AI-Mind – Artificial intelligence for dementia prevention

In the AI-Mind project, the aim is to screen patients suffering from mild cognitive deterioration for early identification of those who have a substantially elevated risk of developing a memory disorder in the next few years. At the moment, memory disorders are often only diagnosed when they are at a considerably advanced stage, and current treatments tend to focus on managing the symptoms rather than arresting the progress of the disease. However, memory disorder progress could be significantly slowed with measures such as effective treatment of cardiovascular disease risk factors, nutrition and cognitive rehabilitation.

When the risk of dementia is identified at an early stage, monitoring and support can be focused on patients who would benefit from this the most. The tools to be developed in the study for early risk identification would improve cost-effectiveness in the treatment of memory disorders. In addition to the enormous human distress they cause, memory disorders inflict huge direct and indirect costs on society at large, and these will increase with the ageing of the population. Today, there are considerable differences between European countries in the diagnostics of memory disorders; another aim of this study is to develop a uniform care chain, which would improve equitable access to treatment.

AICCELERATE

AICCELERATE consists of three pilots whose purpose is to produce effective and cost-efficient health care services by leveraging advanced artificial intelligence technologies. The project involves developing ‘smart hospital’ platform solutions, smart digital treatment pathways and ways of optimizing hospital operations. After proof of concept in the pilots, the aim is to add this scheme to service development in specialist medical care. One of the goals of the project is to raise the efficiency of care modules and to cut costs by 20% to 30%. The new solutions will also help allocate working hours to those who need it the most. Improvements are also sought to the user experience for both patients and health care professionals, and boosting confidence in the solutions developed will also be a goal.

BIGPICTURE

The purpose of the BIGPICTURE project is to create the first European ethical and privacy-compatible pathology operating environment by using artificial intelligence algorithms. The project involves building a platform, with contributions by pathologists, researchers, AI developers, patients and industry representatives. The data and algorithms shared on the platform are available to researchers, and this will continue to be maintained after the project ends. In this project, HUS is coordinating the collecting of diagnostic samples from the lungs and respiratory system and providing clinical expert assistance in building a secure user environment for pathology images.

DECIDER – Improving clinical decisions in cancer

DECIDER is a research and innovation project whose purpose is to improve the diagnostics and treatment of ovarian cancer. The project involves developing new diagnostic tools to identify ovarian cancer patients for whom current treatments are not effective, more reliably and at an earlier stage. This is done by applying AI-based image analysis to genome data obtained from the tumor and data on cells and tissue architecture of the tumor. Another aim is to identify effective individual treatments for these patients on the basis of data obtained from their tumors.

INTERVENE

The purpose of the project is to promote use of genome data by eliminating many of the current challenges involved. The project is about using AI to develop improved risk assessment methods and testing them in an international biobank networks and in collaboration with practical health care operators in the HUS area in Finland, in Estonia and in Italy.

In the segment of the project to be implemented with HUS, a group of patients with a breast cancer diagnosis and their family members will be offered the opportunity of gaining risk data based on the prognostic tools developed in the project.

The project is coordinated by the University of Helsinki, and its Finnish participants, apart from HUS, are the Helsinki Biobank (which is subordinate to HUS), Aalto University and the CSC (IT Center for Science).

VoICES

This project involves developing a patient experience questionnaire suitable for children in collaboration with several European children’s hospitals and other partners (including UNICEF Italy).

The purpose of the project is to engage children in the quality assessment of children’s medical care so that children’s views on how child-friendly care is being provided will be heard and considered. The project involves developing Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREM) suitable for children, which will then be distributed through the European Children’s Hospitals Organization (ECHO) and proposed to be adopted as a tool in gauging the user experience of children in medical care.

European cooperation in research and innovation strengthened