BMD participated in the MetaBreast Consortium meeting, a project part of Health For Portugal (HfPT), held in Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, as the partners of the consortium gathered in person to showcase their overall developments during 2023, aligned with the major objective of aiding surgeons in the planning and in the intra-operatively environment for breast cancer related surgeries in a non-invasive way.
Regarding the planning phase, our team started the meeting by displaying recent developments in the PACScenter ecosystem, that covered several topics:
- Anonymization gateways and profiles.
- Support for structured reports.
- Integration with AI algorithms (ex. MONAI Label).
- Integration with AVA, an algorithm developed by INESC-TEC, that allows to detect the path of perforators based on an semi-automatic approach.
The consortium is composed by the following entities:
The consortium showed by different entities the a demonstrating their efforts on synthetic data generation, as a way of creating more annotated data for the AI models, while also showing the improvements made in the AVA Computer Vision algorithm during 2023.
Champalimaud Foundation members demonstrated their most recent developments in two different strands: in the application of AI models for MRI and the use of XR at intraoperative time, the BreastXR concept. The former deals with segmentation of breast structures and the finding of tumors, which is continuously achieving good metrics. With the latter, it is required a complex pipeline that ranges from the creation of 3D models and their alignment with the patient position, to the capability of visualizing medical information using XR in the surgery block, for example by being able to visualize some metrics computed by the AVA algorithm, for which CF showed an initial demo of this workflow.
IT People also play an important role in this BreastXR concept, by coordinating, setting up and calibrating the different hardware/cameras that are needed to conduct an optimal anonymized surface scan of the patient, so that this information can be fused with the 3D models, all with very low latency.
The meeting also included a visit to the Medical Metaverse Room, which showed how patients are being scanned in order for the high fidelity 3D models to be created. It was very interesting to see how the project is evolving, as all teams are collaboratively working to achieve a feasible solution, effectively changing the perspective in the planning and realization of breast cancer surgeries, which will change people’s lives for the better.
For BMD, the next steps will be to continuously leverage AI and AVA integration, as tools that have the potential to change healthcare decisions. We hope to get back to you soon with more advances with our AI developments!