Over four million euros from the federal government's medical informatics initiative go to Freiburg
The MIRACUM consortium (Medical Informatics in Research and Care in University Medicine) will receive 32.1 million euros in funding from 2018 as part of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MI-I) of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). MIRACUM is backed by eight universities with university hospitals, two universities of applied sciences and one industry partner. The aim is to bring together the currently very different data islands from patient care and research in data integration centers in order to be able to use the data centrally for research projects and specific therapy decisions with the help of innovative IT solutions. As part of the MIRACUM consortium, the University of Freiburg Medical Center - University of Freiburg and the Faculty of Medicine - University of Freiburg will receive 4.4 million euros in funding.
With its medical informatics initiative, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is setting the course for effective digital medicine that reaches the patient. The aim is to link the growing wealth of data - from X-ray images to genetic analyses - in a national infrastructure in order to gain new knowledge for better health research and care.
Advised by a high-caliber international group of experts, the BMBF has now decided to include four consortia, consisting of 17 university hospitals and around 40 other partners, in the four-year development and networking phase of the medical informatics initiative. The BMBF is providing around 120 million euros over the next four years for this purpose.
Projects of the MIRACUM consortium
Whether imaging diagnoses, genetic and molecular examinations, MIRACUM wants to link all this information in order to be able to treat brain tumors more effectively in the future, for example. The planned data analysis will enable patients to be assigned to different subgroups with improved selectivity and thus receive more targeted treatment. The treatment of cancer requires physicians from different specialties to work together. In tumor conferences and in their daily work, they need all available information on their patients: complete and at a glance. MIRACUM will also demonstrate the benefits of networked data and good visual processing in this environment. The consortium will also facilitate data queries for the recruitment of patients for clinical trials.
The funding will help to set up the data integration center in Freiburg. In addition, the design and development of innovative IT solutions for cross-site data use within the MIRACUM consortium is planned.
"We are very pleased to be able to contribute our expertise to this large consortium," says PD Dr. Martin Boeker, Head of the Medical Informatics working group at the Faculty of Medicine in Freiburg. "Our focus is on the areas of machine learning and statistical methods, molecular tumor boards and systems medicine, as well as the content indexing of medical data to make it easier to access."
"The intelligent linking of large amounts of data opens up new possibilities for biomedical research, but also for patient care," says Prof. Dr. Kerstin Krieglstein, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Freiburg. "The project will succeed if we continue to work together across disciplines and locations." Within the University of Freiburg, the bioinformatics department of the Faculty of Engineering is involved in the project.