ASCAPE

ASCAPE’s main objective is to take advantage of the recent ICT advances in Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to support cancer patients’ quality of life and health status. To achieve its objective, ASCAPE created an open AI infrastructure that enables health stakeholders (hospitals, research institutions, companies, etc.) to deploy and execute its AI algorithms locally on their private data. Any new knowledge produced by this process is sent back to the open AI infrastructure. This way the knowledge can be shared among everyone while the medical data still remain private. The services designed, piloted and deployed inside this project include intelligent interventions for physiological and psychological support, improved patient and family counselling and guidance, early diagnosis and forecasts of ill-health, identification of disease trajectories and relapse, improved health literacy etc. ASCAPE focuses on the training of AI in two types of cancer, breast and prostate. This way ASCAPE achieves sufficient coverage across genders as well as age groups, hence facilitating its ongoing improvements and applicability towards any type of cancer in the future.

Reason for applying to HSbooster.eu services

Healthcare systems evolve slowly because they deal with critical activities, i.e., taking care of the quality of life of people. Even though there is a huge advance in semantic and cross-border interoperability, hospitals continue to be reluctant to change their systems and adopt advances mainly because of the collateral effects produced. The usual architecture in these organizations comprises multiple subsystems connected through ad-hoc integration engines. As a result, it is even more challenging for a research project to have a significant impact on standards due to limited time. If accepted in this initiative, ASCAPE as a whole and not on a partner basis will have more tools to reach this goal or even contribute to standards improvement based on lessons learned through the pilots in 4 European countries and three open calls. Overall, we believe that standardization booster will be a significant lever to the maximization of the ASCAPE impact in several aspects beyond the obvious one of the Quality-of-Life of cancer patients improvement.

Main Standardisation Interests

Standardization is an important aspect of the ASCAPE project. So far, related activities of ASCAPE have been focused both on the adoption of already defined standards in healthcare, as well as the follow-up of those standards. This is of great importance since standardization offers a systematic and organised approach to successful project accomplishment, and provides a common terminology based on the consensus of different stakeholders. 
In more detail, ASCAPE aims at creating: 

1. An infrastructure for the provision of semantic interoperability of health data complying with privacy, security and health standards at the European level. 
2. Offer services for the storage and management of homogenized clinical data and metadata allowing the continuum of care without borders, as well as for accuracy, retrieval, analytics and traceability in multicentre studies. 
3. Implementation of Artificial Intelligence) models based on the latest generation of eHealth EHR standards (HL7).