TBIcare · Evidence based Diagnostic and Treatment Planning Solution for Traumatic Brain Injuries

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) occurs when a sudden trauma causes damage to the brain – it is a major health problem and the most common cause of permanent disability in people under the age of 40 years. Yearly cost from TBI in Europe exceeds 100 billion euros. Recent statistics show a steep increase in the incidence of TBIs, with an increase of 21 % over the last five years – threefold greater than the rate of increase in population. Despite this TBI has been seriously underrepresented in medical R&D efforts compared to many other, less significant health problems.TBIcare project provides such an objective and evidence-based solution for management of TBI by improving diagnostics and treatment decisions for an individual patient. A strictly evidence-based approach realises the objectives of developing: 1) a methodology for finding efficient combinations of multi-modal biomarkers used in statistical models to objectively diagnose and assess an individual TBI patient, and 2) a simulation model for objectively predicting outcome of the planned treatment of an individual TBI patient. These objectives are supplemented by realization of: a software solution to be used in daily practice to diagnose and plan treatments; new approaches for extracting information from multi-source and multi-scale physiological databases for management of an extremely heterogeneous disease; and innovative data quantification methods for the clinical TBI environment. Thus, TBIcare transfers the scientific Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) concepts to clinical practice.TBIcare has impacts for healthcare professionals by improving the healthcare process and increasing medical knowledge; for the patients and their nearest by increased quality adjusted life years; for society it brings reduction in healthcare costs and losses due to working disability, and for the European industry it brings an impetus to increased global competitiveness by providing immediately exploitable innovative methods.