A EUROPEAN “SHIELD” AGAINST COLORECTAL CANCER

Modern healthcare systems need to offer new non-invasive methods for colorectal cancer screening and to improve its early detection. Such methods need to be affordable, accessible, and applicable to large parts of the population in order to effectively prevent the development of colorectal cancer.

ONCOSCREEN project responds to this challenge and plans to develop a ground-breaking set of technologies and methods for colorectal cancer screening. In close cooperation with other Mission Cancer projects, ONCOSCREEN will provide solutions for risk-stratified cancer screening programmes for citizens, an integrated diagnostic decision support tool for clinicians as well as intelligent monitoring tools for policy makers. The project will collaborate closely with national cancer mission hubs to facilitate policy dialogue on cancer and related research actions.

The generated ONCOSCREEN tools will be extensively validated through clinical studies with 4100 European citizens and patients participating from 10 different countries. The views and perspectives of citizens and patients will be incorporated through a participatory co-design approach, further reinforced by open innovation and FAIR data. The aim is ultimately to have the solutions adopted by public healthcare systems and everyday clinical practice across Europe.

MKLab leads efforts that will advance colorectal cancer diagnostics. More specifically, it focuses on developing ONCOSCREEN fused data-lake, which is based on the multi-modal fusion of heterogeneous sources of data, such as environmental sources and medical history. Other CERTH tasks include the development of intelligent analytics dashboards and the platform for colonoscopies.