CHIRON project
The CHIRON Project is aiming at exploiting the enormous contribution ICT can give in making possible a radical change in healthcare through:
- An overall, integrated system architecture realizing a ''continuum of care'' i.e., addressing in an integrated approach health management at home, in the hospital and in a nomadic environment where health is addressed not as the management of episodic events but as a value the single person and the whole community have to build and to preserve;
- A ''person-centric approach'' where the needs of the citizens, the medical professionals and the whole community are at the core of the design and the uniqueness of each user is fully recognized (''personalized healthcare'');
- A knowledge-based system integrating past and current data of each patient together with statistical data related to the whole community in a large, distributed repository that is secure, easy to be accessed by the authorized persons, easy to be interpreted and fully understood in spite of the massive and diversified quantity of contextual information.
- Proactive computing in which embedded systems anticipate the needs of people, adapt themselves to context and take the required actions thus enriching quality of life and fostering independence.
The reference architecture for person-centric health management proposed by CHIRON will not be related specifically to a given disease but applicable to various clinical conditions and to various domains (clinical settings, nomadic environments, people's homes). The middleware resulting from the CHIRON project will be applicable for other health related systems development; specific ''transferable'' aspects are the reference architecture to support integrated care cycle, the portable and stationary sensors, measurement devices and actuators, the personal profiling and the personalized approach in healthcare, the new concept of Virtual Data Repository. In the CHIRON project we intend to completely specify these new solutions, implement them with attention also to issues such as data security, privacy, trust and information aging, and evaluate them in clinical trials.
Within this project our group is involved in the development of image processing techniques in cardiac applications. In particular, we focus our attention to cardiac MR images and 3D ultrasounds image of the heart. In the first case, the goal is to develop software for detecting scar in cardiac tissues, whereas 3D US images are used for estimating the elastic characteristics of the tissues.
More info about the CHIRON project can be found at this site.