TumorScope: Leveraging VUB and UZ Brussels expertise towards a digital health research platform.

Rapid technological progress in Next Generation Sequencing is enabling the collection of novel medically relevant data at the molecular level. Concurrently, organized and annotated systems to collect patient data are becoming available, which includes raw medical data such as medical imaging. Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches allow increasingly complex interpretation of such data, especially if the data are integrated. In cancer, AI has shown great promise in characterizing tumors, suggesting appropriate treatments and predicting patient survival. Despite the large potential impact on patient well-being and outcome, a digital health research platform, integrating multimodal data and advanced analytics, is slow to emerge, not in a small part due to (legal) data privacy restrictions. In this project, we leverage the unique expertise and data present at the VUB and the UZ Brussel to create a general framework to store and analyze raw medical data, both at the image and molecular level, in relation to solid tumors, their clinical behavior and response to therapies. An integrated research platform, which conforms to GDPR and patient legislation, will enable AI-driven extraction of new information on breast and brain tumors, as well as sarcomas. Combined with expert insights from clinicians, we will work towards assisting and improving the decision-making process in especially multi-disciplinary oncology consults (MOC).