real-world laboratory "4D-Clinic"

Immune diseases have a wide range of clinical manifestations, which often make a clear diagnosis difficult. They are still incurable today and usually affect several organ systems at the same time. More than two-thirds of these diseases fall within the specialties of rheumatology, dermatology and gastroenterology. Early diagnosis and shorter treatment pathways through interdisciplinary care can improve the outcome of patients. Our research aims to find new diagnostic and prognostic biomarker profiles.

In current clinical care, immune diseases are often viewed in a very subject-area-dependent and organ-centered manner, which can lead to a delayed start of therapy or even misdiagnosis. A care structure for the interdisciplinary exchange and joint treatment of patients with immune-mediated diseases is virtually non-existent.

 

Tailored therapy recommendations through structured collection, analysis and visualization of highly complex patient data

Numerous clinical parameters and scores are collected during the care process. At the same time, innovative biomarker analyses can provide comprehensive information on molecular changes. However, suitable tools for structured data collection, analysis and visualization are lacking to optimize care. 

Using the example of the 4D Inflammation Clinic, the real-world laboratories “4D Clinic” and “Data Intelligence” are developing a platform for the structured collection, analysis and visualization of highly complex patient data from routine care and innovative OMICS analyses. New data correlations will be identified and visualized using artificial intelligence to support medical therapy decisions and predict therapy response.

The 4D clinic real-world laboratory will generate diverse, high-quality data sets on immune diseases that will help to understand the pathogenetic causes of the diseases and to recommend tailored therapies in the future. Challenges lie in secure data storage and limited data set sizes, as well as in establishing suitable analysis pipelines or data networking.

To overcome technical and regulatory challenges, medical, scientific and IT expertise is combined. This fusion is a particular focus of Fraunhofer CIMD.

 

Outlook

As part of the 4D Clinic real-world laboratory, a central data management system including user access management is being set up to incorporate all the data collected. At the same time, we are developing a platform for visualizing the highly complex data. The focus here is on visualization in so-called immunological maps, which summarize the high-dimensional data and allow for a quick classification of patients in comparison to the total cohort. This basis enables a re-stratification of the diseases and can support medical personnel in making therapy recommendations. The platform is being tailored to the needs of various user groups in the transdisciplinary team in close consultation with them.

The introduction of a central data storage, the definition of all relevant measurement parameters and the identification of user group needs form the basis of the current project work. The focus is now on the technical development of the platform, the identification of new biomarker profiles and their visualization in the form of immunological maps. In addition, a data pool is being established that will serve as the basis for this visualization and for future cooperative research projects.