HeartBIT_4.0 Application of innovative Medical Data Science technologies for heart diseases

HeartBIT_4.0 project was submitted to the call: Horizon 2020, Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation: WIDESPREAD-05-2020: Twinning and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 857446.

According to the definition published by the European commission: “Twinning” stands for institutional networking. A twinning project strengthens a specific field of research in an emerging institution in a Widening country. It links the institution with at least two internationally leading counterparts in Europe. Activities like short-term staff exchanges, expert visits, on-site or virtual trainings, workshops, conference attendance, dissemination and outreach are supported (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/twinning).

During the HeartBIT_4.0 project, The Excellence Partners invited to the consortium, will train the staff from the Wroclaw Medical University in the field of Data Science and application of Data Science techniques to medicine.

Support of medical care requires new skills related to effective control of applied medication and methods of treatment, elimination of mutually exclusive medical opinions. There are available technologies to facilitate continuous patient monitoring, including the generation of warning signals, enabling real-time decision support (at the bedside) as well as the ability to dynamically respond to emerging medical conditions and to personalise complex medical care. In the face of progressive digitization, which also involves medicine, acquiring skills, which are based on modern, advanced and state-of-the art computational and analytical techniques, is essential.

The leader of the consortium (ie. The Department of Heart Diseases) has no experience in using modern state-of-the-art methods of analysis and interpretation of large medical data sets. Due to the lack of these skills in the post-industrial era of Big Data and e-society, the Department is forced to accept a secondary role in the contemporary development of biomedical sciences.

Establishing the consortium under Horizon 2020 twinning programme and thus formal cooperation with the leading scientific departments from the developed European Union countries that are experts in Biomedical Data Science will significantly increase the scientific potential of the whole University.

Moreover, the acquisition of the competencies described above will make the Wroclaw Medical University a valuable partner for future cooperation, research projects at the national and international arena. The acquisition of the above-described competences in cardiology will be the first step in implementing this approach in other fields of medicine so that the ultimate beneficiary of the HeartBIT_4.0 project will be the entire university.