New research project funded by the SNF on Diagnostic imaging analysis automation for clinical trial eligibility assessment

The new research project for “Diagnostic imaging analysis automation for clinical trial eligibility assessment” has been selected for funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) for a period of 15 months (more details at https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/242214).

This project will build on the currently funded iCARES project (Multimodal Clinical Data AI-based Integration for Clinical Research Eligibility Surveillance), adding biomedical image analysis to enhance the identification of patients eligible for clinical trials. Our hypothesis for this study is that an automated process based on multimodal vision-text machine learning models can detect patients eligible for a specific clinical trial with increased sensitivity by linking the information extracted from trial descriptions to the corresponding characteristics of diagnostic imaging, with a focus on lesions defined in the RECIST (Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumours) guideline, as applied to clinical trials in oncology.

The project is being led by the Institute of Digital Technologies for Personalized Health Care (MeDiTech) of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) and involves close collaboration with the Ente Ospedaliero Cantonale (EOC).