Challenge
Children’s diseases can develop differently from comparable conditions in adults, yet paediatric specialists often have access to smaller patient populations and less clinical evidence. Relevant information is also distributed across hospital records, medical images, genetic data and specialist databases, making it difficult to compare complex cases or predict how an individual child may respond to treatment.
Clinical decision-support tools therefore need to combine these different data sources while accounting for children’s growth, development and individual physiology. This requires reliable disease models, substantial computing capacity and tools that can deliver results quickly enough to support routine clinical decisions.
Solutions
MD-Paedigree developed a model-driven paediatric digital repository that integrated clinical records, medical images, genetic and metagenomic data, haemodynamic information and biomechanical measurements. Its decision-support environment offered three central functions: finding clinically similar patients, running patient-specific simulations and predictions and supporting personalised clinical workflows.
Using high-performance computing, physicians could explore potential disease development and compare treatment options based on a child’s individual data. The work focused on cardiomyopathies, obesity-related cardiovascular disease, juvenile idiopathic arthritis and neurological and neuromuscular disorders.
Results
The project delivered an advanced paediatric “infostructure” that brought together heterogeneous medical data, analytical tools and reusable disease models. It enabled clinicians to search for “patients like mine”, analyse treatment outcomes, assess risks and use simulations to support more personal clinical decisions.
The platform provided a foundation for further research beyond paediatrics. CARDIOPROOF reused the infostructure for model-based cardiology research, while the MHMD project incorporated and extended it for sharing electronic health records. MD-Paedigree also received the Best Exhibit Award at the European Commission’s ICT2013 event.