Here you can read about everything that's happening in the ISB Group.
There is a new chance to hear about our digital twins. This time it is in connection to the project MeDigiT, on Medical Digital Twins, which involves us, the groups of Tino Ebbers and Jonas Lanz, as well as e.g. our spin-off company SUND sound medical decisions, the company AMRA medical, etc. We speak today at the Innovation week, at 11.10-11.50 in the hospital building of Linköping University hospital. Link to more info about the entire Innovation day today. Welcome! 🙂
Today I, Gunnar Cedersund, am giving a lecture on digital twins in the beautiful city of Malå, up in the North of Sweden. The lecture is part of a week they have on the potential of AI in our evolving societies. Today’s event starts with a lecture on AI, then I talk about our digital twins, and finally there will be a panel debate, where also some politicians participate. Here is a link to the event, which I think is only attendable in person, even though my lecture and participation will be done via teams.
Welcome! 🙂
Gunnar
Time: 19th September 2024, 12.00 – 13.00
Zoom link: https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/63082836653
Read more about the STRATIF-AI project here: https://stratif-ai.eu/
This lecture is a part of the LIU seminar series on eHealth: https://liu.se/en/research/ehealth
Welcome!
We are excited to announce that we have secured new funding from ALF, the state-funded research program for clinical research in collaboration with Swedish regions. The grant has been awarded to Gunnar Cedersund, the coordinator of STRATIF-AI, for a project titled “Implementation and Evaluation of a Digital Twin-Based eHealth Application for Preventive Health Dialogues.”
This project is directly linked to Clinical Study 2 within STRATIF-AI, which assesses our application designed for use during and after preventive health dialogues at primary healthcare centers. In this study, we will compare standard clinical practice with 300 health dialogues incorporating the new app.
With this additional funding, we can enhance app development and expand the clinical study to include 400 patients. The project will span three years, with an annual budget of 900,000 SEK, totaling approximately 3 million SEK (around 300,000 EUR). This support will significantly bolster our efforts in the field of preventive healthcare.
In this workshop, which will be held the 5th of November, we will discuss hybrid approaches, combining traditional bioinformatics and machine learning, with new generative AI approaches and mechanistically based digital twins. This combination of methods is ideal for dealing with a variety of different data types, and for developing AI models that are explainable and trustworthy. The event will feature keynote lectures, talks selected from abstracts, a poster session, and will be in hybrid format. Link to more info here:
New hybrid approaches to Precision Medicine: machine learning, generative AI, and digital twins
A few weeks ago, on June 10, STRATIF-AI had its first meeting with fellow EU projects funded under the same call, all focusing on the use of AI for improved patient stratification. This initial two-hour meeting served as an introduction to each project and a discussion of key shared challenges (see Figure below). These challenges include data interoperability, federated learning, trustworthy and explainable AI (xAI), and MDR certifications.
During the meeting, we presented some core concepts of STRATIF-AI, such as our hybrid approach that combines multi-level, multi-timescale, and multi-organ simulations using mechanistic models as inputs to machine-learning models. This hybrid approach enhances the explainability of our models.
Furthermore, we explained shortly how STRATIF-AI uses data harmonization in two places: i) in connection to the federated learning set up by a collaboration between Catalina Martinez Costa (University of Murcia) and Lucia Gregorio Rodriguez (TREE), and ii) in connection to integrating a copy data from a variety of different sources into a personal data vault (Jesper Fellenius at Z2).
This collaboration and network of related projects will be useful for us to use in various related topics as we move forward, and we from STRATIF-AI are looking forward to new meetings. Thanks to the team at PREPARE for setting this meeting up.
We have a new part of the digital twin published! This time the new part, or sub-model, concerns the fat-driven disease etiology in the liver, based on fat fluxes in and out of the liver (Fig B below). As can be seen in Fig A, the model agrees with data for MRS PDFF, which is a magnetic resonance-based way of measuring liver fat, as well as with data for De novo lipogenesis (DNL), and e.g. ketone production and VLDL-TAG (Fig 2C-D in the paper). As usual, the model can describe data from different clinical studies, covering different diet and drug interventions in different cohorts, and the model can also successfully predict new data not used for training. This new sub-model is now being connected with the other meal and drug response models in the overall digital twin backend, and will thus become an integrated part of the future digital twin applications.
Full reference: A unified framework for prediction of liver steatosis dynamics in response to different diet and drug interventions. Simonsson C, Nyman E, Gennemark P, Gustafsson P, Hotz I, Ekstedt M, Lundberg P, Cedersund G.Clin Nutr. 2024 Jun;43(6):1532-1543. doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2024.05.017
Two days after STRATIF-AI was featured at the BME@LIU-day in Linköping, Sweden, it is featured again in the ISMH conference in Technirghiol, Rumania. In Linköping, we had a shared booth with SUND (the spin-off company that converts the digital twins to eHealth products), and produced a roll-up and a poster. This roll-up has now been transported to Rumania, together with Gunnar Cedersund, to be displayed at a 2h session at the ISMH conference. This happens today May 23, at 17-19, CET, and can be viewed online.
ISMH stands for the International Society of Medical Hydrology and Climatology. In other words, the conference deals with water-based treatments, such as spas (German: kurort), mineral waters, mud baths, as well as temperature-based treatments, such as saunas, ice-baths, etc. These are old traditional treatments, that dates back to ancient Greek, at the least, but there is also a growing scientific interest, with 10 times more papers published per year today, compared to 20 years ago. Still, the ISMH is old, by scientific standards, and the conference celebrated its 125th birthday yesterday. In the picture below, you see Prof, MD Gelu Onose, one of our main collaborators in STRATIF-AI, and also one of the the main organizer of the event, who cut the first piece of the cake, during yesterday’s celebration.
While the official motto of the conference is “Evidence-based balneology”, while there are lots of medical doctors and professors here, and while balneology is an established speciality in medicine in quite a few countries in Europe, it is still a field that lies on the fringes of medicine. For instance, in Sweden, balneology is not an established discipline of medicine, and MDs cannot become specialized in this field, as they can in e.g. cardiology, or hepatology. Therefore, balneology is to some extent similar to other alternative treatments, such as yoga, regular exercise and gym-based personal trainers, health coaches, etc. They exist in society, they work with health, there is some scientific support for the health benefits of these activities, but they are to a large extent not integrated in conventional healthcare. This is where the activities and visions of STRATIF-AI can contribute. Our ambition is to go from a doctor-centric fragmented system, to an integrated patient-centric eco-system system (see picture below). In this eco-system, e.g. personal trainers can take over where nurses leave a patient, following a health conversation (as in our clinical study 2 in STRATIF-AI). And in this eco-system, one can add new actors, such as spas and kurorts, as long as there is evidence that their methods work, and as long as the underlying mechanisms can be added to the digital twin’s models and visualizations.
The 2h session we will have is structured as follows: First, Gunnar Cedersund, the coordinator of STRATIF-AI gives an overview of STRATIF-AI, and of the digital twins, which converts knowledge and data to computational models. Thereafter Prof Gelu Onose from SCUBA (in the picture above), and his colleagues Constantin Munteanu and Cristina Popescu (both MDs), give an overview of the scientific basis for prevention and treatment of stroke using different modalities, including balneology. Thereafter, we look at the data integration aspects: Jesper Fellenius from Z2 gives an overview of the personal data vault, Cati Martinez from University of Murcia talks about their work with semantic harmonization and inter-operability, and SIMAVI talk about their work on Electronic Healthcare Records, and app developments, e.g. for rehabilitation of stroke. The session is concluded with a round-table discussion. All things can be followed online, at this link. The general link to the conference is available here.
