GÉANT and Sim-e-Child – improving diagnosis and providing customised paediatric cardiology treatment
Combining grid-based infrastructure and high speed research networks to deliver a complete resource for clinicians in Europe and the US
Advances in paediatric cardiac surgery, interventional cardiology, intensive care and non-invasive imaging have led to a substantial increase in life expectancy for many patients with congenital heart disease. However the study and treatment of paediatric (child) cardiology has always been hampered by the scarcity of relevant cases. This leads to a lack of integrated data between doctors and consequently limited opportunities for clinical comparison of information. Adding to this, the heart and vascular systems of children are still developing, meaning treatment needs to be personalised to individual patients.
The Sim-e-Child project aims to deliver this improved and personalised diagnosis, treatment and research. Developed from the Health-e-Child project, it is built on a powerful grid-based platform with enormous processing power, linked by high speed research networks such as GÉANT.
The Sim-e-Child platform helps clinicians in Europe and the US in four main areas:
- It provides a multi-site database of international data, information and knowledge for translational research
- The grid-based platform delivers a robust infrastructure for scientific research simulations
- Through an enhanced and expanded model of the heart (based on the Heart-e-Child model), it offers a unique environment for developing, testing and assessing models
- Taken together these resources support clinical decision making on individual diagnoses and overall knowledge discovery in the field.
The Challenge
While relatively rare, child cardiology cases can be difficult to treat due to a scarcity of comparative data and the fact that a child’s heart and vascular systems are still developing.
The Solution
The Sim-e-Child project has combined high bandwidth research networks and grid computing power to create an easily accessible international paediatric cardiology database and a simulation platform to model child heart systems.
Key Benefits
Sim-e-Child provides cardiology professionals in Europe and the US with a complete e-infrastructure, including a decision support system that supports more informed diagnosis and a virtual laboratory for scientific simulations that extend existing models of child heart and vascular systems. 
Read the full case study
Partners in the Sim-e-Child project:
Siemens AG
Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù
John Hopkins University
American College of Cardiology
maatG
Technische Universität München
Lynkeus
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