The objective of the consultancy in the project is to support the design and implementation of a decision support system (DSS) capable of assisting healthcare professionals in the identification of personalized supplements to introduce into the diets of cancer patients, thus creating calibrated food supplements on nutritional needs. Consistent with the challenges of Precision Medicine, the extreme diversity of each individual in the response to food treatments requires the creation of personalized supplement formulas. This personalized formulation can only be carried out following an analysis of the patient's characteristics (hormonal, physical parameters, anamnestic data, etc.). The extreme variety of physiological, genetic and clinical characteristics of each patient, together with the large number of patients affected by oncological diseases, requires a laborious analysis process for the formulation of food supplements suitable for specific individual needs. With the aim of supporting healthcare professionals in identifying the optimal mix of ingredients for food supplements, the knowledge possessed by the team relating to both the formulation methods of food supplements and the nutritional needs of cancer patients will first be formalized in a Knowledge Base. Secondly, an innovative technological decision support platform will be designed and implemented, which, through the analysis of the information present in the KB, will be able to formulate the ingredients of food supplements to accompany the pharmacological therapy of cancer patients, processing the situation specific and individual of the patient and the metabolomic data in combination with the diagnostic ones. To this end, the DSS will be based on modeling techniques and Artificial Intelligence algorithms for the correct representation, interpretation and evaluation of both the medical knowledge provided and validated by domain experts, and the specific and individual situation of the particular cancer patient.

Announcement

Public notice from the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy for the presentation and selection of industrial research and experimental development projects within the National Operational Program for Business and Competitiveness 2014-2020 FESR and the Fund for Sustainable Growth.

Application area: Precision Medicine

Start date: 1 December 2020

End date: 31 December 2023