Health-e-Child Network: Better care for little kids

Published: 07/02/2009

BRUXELLES, BELGIUM - (HealthTech Wire / News) - What is the best way to operate on a child with a particular congenital heart disease? How are certain brain tumours that occur at a very early age best dealt with? The European Health-e-Child network (www.health-e-child.org) strives to help paediatricians in cases like these by connecting major paediatric hospitals through high-performance grid technology.

Four paediatric hospitals in Paris, Rome, Genoa and London form the core of this network, which is funded under the umbrella of the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme. Several European companies, research centres and university departments are also involved. “The aim of this project is to build a database of biomedicine for paediatrics, so that different clinical institutions all over Europe have access. Some cases are relatively rare, and sharing knowledge with others is particularly useful”, says project coordinator Joerg Freund.

The grid network gives doctors secure access to both patient and research data of all cooperating institutions and to nearly unlimited computing power thanks to the grid technology. This enables, for example, a paediatric heart specialist treating a child with a rare cardiac malformation to check whether patients with similar scans have been treated in other institutions. He is then able to see what kind of surgery was performed and what the outcome was.

Additional applications that run on the grid network can be of further benefit. Experts have, for example, developed software to facilitate the planning of heart surgeries using 3D graphics simulation. This relies both on modern MRI imaging technology and on the massive computer power provided by the grid architecture. “The ultimate goal is not only to plan the treatment, but also to determine whether patients actually need it, or when is the best time for them to get that treatment,” says Andrew Taylor of Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Centre for Cardiovascular MR, one of the institutions involved in the Health-e-Child project.