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UBITECH participates in the DESTINY National Research Project on treatment management of patients with cancer

UBITECH participates in the kick-off meeting, in Athens, Greece (September 26, 2018) of the DESTINY Greek research project, officially started on September 1st, 2018. The project is co-funded by the action “Researching-Creating-Innovating” (under the instrument “Partnerships of Enterprises with Research Organizations”) of the operational programme for Research, Technological Development and Innovation of the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religion Matters (Grant Agreement No. T1EDK-02886) and spans on the period September 2018 – August 2021. The DESTINY project proposes to develop and, subsequently, support the clinical implementation of an advanced medical decision support system (DSS) for patients with high grade ovarian epithelial cancer (HGOC), based on radiogenomics, to enable the automatic classification of HGOC patients into risk categories. The produced DSS would provide important tools for MR image optimization, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data processing, and medical and statistical data storage and therefore, it could be potentially used as a comprehensive digital service by health professionals for personalized medicine.

Additionally, an easily applicable software for converting medical MR images to radiomics (three dimensional-3D model) will be created; the extracted radiomics will be combined with genetic data from primary ovarian tumor, co-existing metastatic disease or relapsed tumor (if it happens) in order to produce radiogenomics, to be potentially used as biomarkers for tumor prognosis. DESTINY’s final goal is to identify – through noninvasive imaging – those women with HGOC who have adverse prognostic features and to eventually classify these patients into risk groups; accurate preoperative classification of HGOC patients into risk categories may be associated with early customization of treatment, optimizing the therapeutic outcome and therefore, it may improve patients’ survival rates. The above prognostic model will be supported by an easily reproducible DSS. It is expected that both, the applied MRI software for radiomics extraction and the produced DSS, will have the potential to be used for the evaluation of other types of cancer besides HGOC, assisting the implementation of tailored therapy to the individual patient (precision medicine).

Within DESTINY, UBITECH undertakes the design, development and testing of the sophisticated medical decision support system adopting radiogenomics, for the accurate preoperative classification of HGOC patients into risk categories and the early customization and personalization of treatment, optimizing the therapeutic outcome and therefore improving patients’ survival rates.