Department of Medical Sciences

Project description

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) are chronic diseases characterized by progressive or alternate impairment of neurological functions (motor, sensory, visual, cognitive). Patients have to manage alternated periods in hospital with care at home, experiencing a constant uncertainty regarding the timing of the disease acute phases and facing a considerable psychological and economic burden that also involves their caregivers. Clinicians, on the other hand, need tools able to support them in all the phases of the patient treatment, suggest personalized therapeutic decisions, indicate urgently needed interventions.

Artificial Intelligence is the key to successfully satisfy these needs to: i) better describe disease mechanisms; ii) stratify patients according to their phenotype assessed all over the disease evolution; iii) predict disease progression in a probabilistic, time dependent fashion; iv) investigate the role of the environment; v) suggest interventions that can delay the progression of the disease.

BRAINTEASER will integrate large clinical datasets with novel personal and environmental data collected using low-cost sensors and apps. Software and mobile apps will be designed embracing an agile and user-centred design approach, accounting for the technical, medical, psychological and societal needs of the specific users.

BRAINTEASER will implement a system able to guarantee cybersecurity and data ownership to the patients; will provide quantitative evidence of benefits and effectiveness of using AI in health-care pathways implementing a proof-of-concept of its use in real clinical setting. Procedural requirements that support Software as Medical Device certification will be used involving clinicians and patients stakeholders and producing a set of recommendations for public health authorities. Results will be disseminated accordingly to an open science paradigm under the European Open Science Cloud initiative.

Notes