Phillips Healthcare are funding a this project aimed at enhancing the collaboration between the Department of Computing Science and the Department of Cardiology that has a special interest in the detection, investigation and management of serious heart disease (such as heart failure).
The Department of Cardiology has one of the world's largest and detailed data-bases on an epidemiologically representative population with heart failure. An extensive range of clinical and advanced bio-marker data is available.
The Department of Cardiology also has an interest in remote patient monitoring (tele-monitoring). This creates a new and unique problem for clinical medicine since the density of data becomes much greater (for instance instead of basing care on one blood pressure measurement it might be 100 or 1,000 measurements). Computer-assisted data-interpretation and decision support analysis are likely to be a critical aspect of improving patient care in the near-future
This new project will involve several of the following
a) Extraction and analysis of data from a large 'conventional'
clinical data set reflecting about 30,000 patient-years of follow-up and
more than 2,000 deaths in order to
a. identify patients with and without serious heart disease
b. identify when and how patients are going to die so that care can
be planned better. This will entail using complex data-mining techniques
b) Interrogation of time-series data from
a. Proof-of-concept short-term studies using non-invasive
technologies to assess cardiovascular function
b. Longer-term tele-monitoring studies to predict cardiovascular
risk
c) Development of systems that provide decision support to improve
the clinical application of therapy to individual patient need
These areas of interest are supported by several large European Union Funded Projects including HeartCycle, BRAVEHEALTH, SICA-HF and BIOSTAT-HF as well as projects funded by the UK National Institute of Health Research (CACHE).