Over the past decade, hospitals and other healthcare providers have put massive amounts of time and energy into adopting electronic healthcare records, turning hastily scribbled doctors' notes into durable sources of information. But collecting these data is less than half the battle. It can take even more time and effort to turn these records into actual insights — ones that use the learnings…
Legal challenges hamper the sharing of health data with researchers outside the EU/European Economic Area (EEA), a new report by European academy networks concludes. The authors call for solutions to overcome these barriers to ensure timely and straightforward research collaboration in the public sector and thereby maximize health benefits for European citizens.
Brainlab, a digital medical technology company, announced today the acquisition of Mint Medical GmbH, a Heidelberg-based company that develops image reading and reporting software for clinical routine and research. The acquisition underscores the Brainlab commitment to digital health and aims to improve the structured diagnosis, analysis and treatment of cancer and other diseases to address the…
Harnessing the power of radiomics, and adopting an integrated approach to combine imaging and patient data could lead to better clinical cancer outcomes. The move has opened the door for clinicians to explore a non-invasive approach to identify the heterogeneity of a tumour and more accurately target regions for biopsy. During a presentation at ECR 2021 in March, Professor Evis Sala will…
A new EU-wide repository for health-related imaging data could boost development and marketing of AI tools for better cancer management. The open-source database will collect and harmonise images acquired from 40,000 patients, spanning different countries, modalities and equipment. This approach could eliminate one of the major bottlenecks in the clinical adoption of AI today: Data bias.
Reports from Imperial College regarding the spread and the effects of Covid-19 had considerable policy impacts in several European countries. But the models that informed the reports have considerable flaws, and are not sufficient to draw the conclusions that were published. This is according to researchers from universities including Linköping University (LiU), in an article in Nature.
Digital epidemiology is on the frontline in the Covid-19 war, with innovative techniques used to observe and monitor this viral spread across populations. Its increasingly important role was outlined to a virtual session at Medica 2020 by theoretical biologist Professor Dirk Brockmann. In a keynote presentation ‘Perspective of digital epidemiology – opportunities, promises and challenges’,…
The new Joint Imaging Platform – JIP for short – is a flexible, decentralized analysis platform for medical images. The JIP was initially developed for the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK) sites. It is designed to facilitate cross-institutional imaging projects and to help meet the technical and legal challenges associated with the joint use of imaging data.
With COVID-19 testing an important part of controlling the spread of the virus, finding an effective software system to manage the testing process and collate the results, on a national level and individually within businesses, hospitals, care-homes and schools etc., is essential. Thomson Screening developed SchoolScreener Imms in order to manage health testing within schools, but with the…
Research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, imec, announced elPrep5, the newest version of its software platform for DNA analysis. Obtaining identical results, elPrep5 is eight to 16 times faster than the genome analysis toolkit (GATK) — the widely-accepted standard reference. The imec platform encompasses the full analysis pipeline from data preparation to variant…
Siri and Alexa are leading the way: the virtual assistants meet many daily needs. Soon, similarly programmed software and a ‘digital patient twin’, will be launched into the medical world – both IT applications based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The virtual medical assistant and digital patient twin are two key aspects of a research project ‘Models for Personalised Medicine’.…
More than 73,000 users collaborate on new online platform set up by the European Open Science Cloud Initiative, where scientists share COVID-19 data and accelerate our understanding of the virus to help develop treatments and vaccines quicker.
To answer medical questions that can be applied to a wide patient population, machine learning models rely on large, diverse datasets from a variety of institutions. However, health systems and hospitals are often resistant to sharing patient data, due to legal, privacy, and cultural challenges. An emerging technique called federated learning is a solution to this dilemma, according to a study…
Luis Martí-Bonmatí, Director of the Medical Imaging Department at La Fe Hospital in Valencia, highlighted the need to assess utility when developing AI tools during ECR 2020. Artificial intelligence (AI) can impact and improve many aspects of clinical practice. But current expectations are too great and need to be toned down by looking at opportunities.
Thales’ expert knowledge in digital technology as well as in hardware and software systems has enabled the company to become a market leader in major innovation fields such as the cloud, connectivity and artificial intelligence. Thales is proud to launch its unique Connected Radiology platform which will bring multiple benefits to the efficiency of hospitals through the non-stop use of…
A British cyber security company, VST Enterprises has signed a contract with international digital health technology firm Circle Pass Enterprises (CPE), owner of ‘Covi-Pass’, to supply 50 million of its ‘digital health passports’ to 15 countries. VST was founded by tech entrepreneur Louis-James Davis to integrate its state-of-the-art VCode & VPlatform technologies into the Covi-Pass…
It is possible to implement a privacy-respecting contact tracing app that can achieve widespread adoption in the UK, but only if the NHS, rather than the government, run it, researchers at Cass Business School have found. The researchers found that adoption rates increase further if the app is linked to priority testing for COVID-19 for those who get infection alerts. They also found that the…
HM Hospitales, a leading Hospital Group in Madrid, decided to provide the international scientific community with totally anonymized health data regarding patients being treated for the SARS-CoV-2 virus in their facilities.
A new strategy to transform imaging in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has been unveiled after a major data-gathering project to assess the present state of the service. The process will see the creation of a national strategy for imaging networks designed to deliver improved care and better value services for patients. Key to this has been ‘The Model Hospital’ concept – a digital…
Re-using clinical data for research is an academic and organisational challenge, but there is much to gain from this to advance healthcare. During the January Triangle leadership meeting in Madrid, Dr Xavier Pastor, CMIO at Hospital Clínic – Universitat de Barcelona, explained how his institution developed one of Spain’s first programs to promote real world data use in research projects.…
Toshiba and the Tohoku University Medical Megabank Organisation (ToMMo) has succeeded in demonstrating the world’s first quantum cryptography transmission of whole-genome sequence data, with data volumes exceeding several hundred gigabytes. Since speeds for key distribution in quantum cryptographic communication technologies are currently about 10 Mbps at maximum, the speed at which data can be…
Dramatic developments in digital technologies have fuelled the growth and need for a mobile workforce, with the number of mobile workers predicted to climb to 1.87 billion by 2022 – accounting for almost half (42.5%) of the global workforce. The healthcare industry is no exception to this. In fact, the global healthcare mobility solutions market is predicted to experience a 25% year on year…
It’s a world’s first. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is collaborating with Amazon to provide reliable health information from the service’s website through voice-assisted technology. In a speech announcing the service, Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, addressed the need for dependable information.
Consider the diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities resulting from access to pertinent data from thousands of anonymized patient medical scans. What new patterns, options, or evidence for actionable insights could be derived from all this information? Cloud-based data is easily accessible via computer, smartphone, or tablet and is a valuable complement to the insights from the millions of…
‘Compared to other sectors, healthcare is lagging behind in the systematic use of electronic data,’ says Martin Seychell, EU Deputy Director-General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) and top official at the European Health Forum Gastein (EHFG). ‘However,’ he adds, ‘this is changing and the digital transformation is happening right now.’