Colon Cancer and IT experts from BBMRI.at partners Med Uni Graz and Med Uni Innsbruck are partner in the EU project ONCOSCREEN and contribute medical data from colorectal cancer cohorts including stained tissue slides. The project started recently and is funded by Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) (call HORIZON-MISS-2021-CANCER-02-01).

Colorectal cancer accounts for over 10% of all deaths due to cancer, which shows a urgent need for highly efficient but less expensive screening programs. The EU project ONCOSCREEN exactly aims towards such programs and wants to developing a set of novel, practical, and low-cost screening technologies with high sensitivity and specificity. It also aims to leverage artificial intelligence to improve existing methodologies for colorectal cancer screening, allowing for the early detection of polyps.

At Med Uni Graz (R&D Institute of Pathology) a colorectal cancer (CRC) cohort has been establish over many years and is professionally stored at Biobank Graz, one of the largest European hospital based biobanks. The cohort used in the Oncoscreen project contains 180,000 images (800 TB) from 6,400 cases (including H&E staining and immunohistochemistry from FFPE CRC tissue sections).

Drawing from its work with BBMRI-ERIC and various industry collaborations performed by teams around BBMRI.at director Kurt Zatloukal and Heimo Mueller (both Med Uni Graz), Med Uni Graz will leverage its experience in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and construction whole slide image (WSI) catalogues.

Med Uni Graz (PI: Heimo Mueller) leads the platform for histopathology image training with the support of Med Uni Innsbruck (PI: Johannes Haybäck).

More about the Colorectal Cancer Whole Slide Image (CRC WSI) Cohort>

Further (inter)national projects where BBMRI.at members are partners>

More about the ONCOSREEN project>

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