PerMed-COPD Consortium
PerMed-COPD (Implementing Personalized Medicine for COPD Prevention and Treatment) is a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, experimentalists, computer scientists, patient representatives and a medium-sized company that will implement a Personalized Medicine platform for COPD treatment and prevention of disease worsening. The project is funded by the BMBF.
The aim of PerMed-COPD is to implement a novel personalised strategy for COPD patients and compare a “usual care” group with an AI-driven, clinical decision support system integrating clinical diagnostics with CT imaging assessing lung disease as well as coronary calcifications, osteoporosis and sarcopenia. Based on these findings, personalized decisions with respect to further diagnostic and/or therapeutic procedures will be made.
The role of the QCT imaging core unit at the University Hospital Heidelberg is to validate and implement candidate biomarkers derived from QCT in an advanced clinical environment. This comprises quantitative changes in airway structure (e.g. re-modeling), lung density (e.g. emphysema index) and functional evaluation using in- and expiratory CT scans for the detection of small airways disease (represented with parametric response maps). Beyond the changes directly related to COPD, relevant comorbidities will be included into the evaluation (i.e., pulmonary nodules/lung cancer, vascular calcifications, osteoporosis, obesity, sarcopenia). By implementing these data in the clinical decision tool, it will be possible to evaluate the global clinical value of CT scanning (with and without additional expiratory scan) and of single or subsets of biomarkers.
Team
Prof. Dr. med. Hans-Ulrich Kauczor
Prof. Dr. med. Jürgen Biederer