The Department of Precision Medicine of Maastricht University Receives 920K€ from the European Commission to Further Develop Their Work on Artificial Intelligence Tools for COVID-19 Patients

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands, May 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Department of Precision Medicine  at Maastricht University (The Netherlands) announced today the release of their AI tool for COVID-19 patient triage, the same week that they received 920K€ from the European Commission for the DRAGON project (link: information on the grant).

The D-Lab group of the Dpt of Precision Medicine is developing a personalized medicine platform to enable risk assessment of COVID-19 patients. The models, made by the group or published elsewhere, are available world-wide on their new platform https://covid19risk.ai

"We are excited to be participating in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic with our Decision Support System for Risk Assessment of COVID-19 patients. We have repurposed our AI methods, usually applied to oncology questions, to the COVID-19 pandemic," said Prof. Philippe Lambin, Department Head. The platform can integrate various types of medical data available as well as assess the risk of severe disease that requires mechanical ventilation.

"We also have simple models to identify vulnerable patients that should follow a strict lockdown, which include, for example, not doing their groceries themselves if they are over the age of 64 and have high blood pressure," said Dr. Avishek Chatterjee.

The recently funded European project DRAGON will achieve a patient empowerment centred decision support system that will enable multiple stakeholders to participate in improved and more rapid diagnosis, as well as the potential of precision medicine for accelerated development of new therapies.

Dr. Cary Oberije,  head of the Virtual Trial Unit of the Dpt of Precision Medicine, added: "One of our missions will be to coordinate an international prospective biomarker trial on COVID-19 patients. We want to understand this virus better and use this knowledge for future outbreaks, also for other viruses."

The entire effort will be supported by the deployment of a federated machine learning system, a technology developed in Maastricht by Prof Lambin's group, that will allow for the GDPR compliant use of multinational data resources.

About the Dpt of Precision Medicine

The Department of Precision Medicine is a disease-agnostic AI department with an international group of researchers at Maastricht University. For more information visit www.precisionmedicinemaastricht.eu.