WIDTH · Warehousing images in the digital hospital (WIDTH): interpretation, infrastructure, and integration

Advanced information communications technology (ICT) has created an expectation that the innovative use of ICT can deliver high quality healthcare to a situation where patients’ data can be supplied seamlessly to support clinical decisions. The world however has moved beyond the current reactive model and hamstrung by the problems of fragmentation and lack of coordination. Medical images are of a typical example. While picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) have come closely to be a universal tool in managing medical images, they only work for radiology images and are searchable by using text descriptions. With the rapidly growing of image volumes, obtaining a relevant datum using only key words is like finding a needle in a haystack. On the other hand, with each clinical centre specialises in different domains, medical images collected are fragmented and of many forms. To this end, this project will catalyse a series of collaborations between Europe and China that has significant number of distributed databases, built on the achievements and impetus gained by the TIME project funded by EU Asia-ICT programme, to explore the breadth of medical imaging innovations by building in inter-disciplinarity, aiming at knowledge transfer to keep abreast of new developments and applications in the field, while fertilising each other’s research, especially between young and experienced researchers and between different disciplines. The key output of the project is a roadmap of the development of future sustainable and flexible data management systems in the digital (paper-less) global hospital. This project is consisted of a series of programmes including staff exchange, know-how transfer, sharing and learning workshops and online participation, by including institutions of 6 European and 5 Chinese with participating personnel of 41. Among them, seven are females and twenty-three are young researchers who are at their early stage of careers.