About
TumorScope is an interdisciplinary research project dedicated to advancing cancer research through the development of a secure digital health research platform that facilitates the development of methodologies to better understand cancer, while taking into account legal considerations regarding patient and data security. The interdisciplinary VUB-UZB consortium brings together physicians, hospital IT experts, researchers in medical imaging and molecular analysis, and legal and ethical experts.
TumorScope has helped to develop an in-hospital digital health platform that enables secure storage, management, and responsible sharing of valuable research data in compliance with the current legal and ethical frameworks. We now aim to develop AI-driven methods that combine real-world molecular, demographic, clinical, and radiomics image data while safeguarding the privacy, rights, and autonomy of patients.
We focus on cancer research as it is a complex disease that requires multimodal data from a variety of sources to better understand its mechanisms and improve diagnosis and treatment. However, the current legal and ethical challenges need to be respected as well. Therefore, we leverage the in-hospital creation of the digital health platform with investigations of the legal and ethical challenges surrounding its development, relating to storage and access of data as well as the use of AI methods for diagnosis.
Ultimately, the insights from this research will be fed back to the hospital level and connected to practical solutions to enable and stimulate innovative AI-based solutions accelerating and improving disease diagnosis, prognosis, and patient outcome.
Work packages
The entire project is structured around the four following work packages:
- WP1 - Development of a multi-modal data capable AI pipeline for glioma molecular subtyping.
- WP2 - An integrated digital health data platform at the UZB.
- WP3 - The impact and local application of legal frameworks for digital health.
- WP4 - Coordination and management.