Very little knowledge and experience is to be found outside of leading children’s hospitals when it comes to treating rare diseases that affect young people. Many doctors therefore waste valuable time searching for experts and information in medical emergencies involving children. The Health-e-Child platform, a project initiated by the European Union, can be a big help here. The platform focuses on heart disease, infectious diseases, and brain tumors. As the lead partner in the project, Siemens is coordinating a cooperative effort between IT specialists from companies, universities, and research centers and experts from four renowned children’s hospitals — the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London, Hospital Necker in Paris, the Giannina Gaslini Institute in Genoa, and the Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù in Rome. The objective of the project is to make available to pediatricians a Web-based database that can also be used to prevent illnesses, recognize them at an early stage, and plan follow-up treatments for the patients. The database contains patient records from all of the participating hospitals, which experts have linked with relevant medical research results.

The project’s long-term plans also call for Health-e- Child to provide pediatricians with instruments that will facilitate their decisions concerning treatment options. This will require the integration of traditional biomedical data and new sources of information from fields such as genetics and proteomics. Siemens CT is therefore developing procedures that use such data to create points of reference for pediatricians, as well as techniques for filtering out relevant patterns from the huge amount of data obtained through medical imaging processes. Among other things, this will enable the precise planning of operations and the visualization of results — even before an operations begins.