Partners

University of Barcelona, a combination of traditional values with innovation, quality, and inclusion, has 16 faculties and a Science Park, a Science and Technology Centre service, 17 research institutes, over 500 research groups, and nearly 6000 researchers. University of Barcelona has the mission to provide a public service for higher education, with the highest level of quality, through study, teaching, research, and effective management of knowledge transfer.

Apart from the scientific coordination and the DataTools4Heart project management tasks, Barcelona Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (BCN-AIM) group from the University of Barcelona will implement an innovative, unbiased, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant federated learning platform.

Amsterdam University Medical Center is a dynamic centre with 800 employees focusing on research, education, and clinical care, making it the largest heart centre in the Netherlands. High-complex data-driven care is provided with a strong focus on high-quality research with special attention, together with several medical specialties, including thoracic surgery, internal medicine and emergency medicine embedded in the research theme Amsterdam Cardiovascular Science. The Amsterdam University Medical Center closely collaborates with the University of Amsterdam, the Free University of Amsterdam, and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. There is also a strong collaboration with several departments and educational programs including Medical Informatics, Artificial Intelligence, Research Data Management, Epidemiology and Data Science. Besides traditional basic and translational research, the Amsterdam University Medical Center and specifically the Heart Center also strongly focuses on valorisation. Amsterdam University Medical Center has set up a wide range of core facilities and a data infrastructure that enables the development of science practices to Open Science. Dedicated research support teams are in place to create a stimulating research environment and provide hands-on support to researchers. Close collaboration between different departments is strongly encouraged.

Amsterdam University Medical Center provides the expert domain knowledge in cardiovascular disease and is responsible for the design and coordination of the clinical case studies within DataTools4Heart. Furthermore, it will be part of the federated network and the synthetic cardiovascular database that will be built within DataTools4Heart to promote EU-wide collaboration within the field of cardiology.

ATHENA Research Center is a centre of scientific excellence applied and developed within various fields of research. Its mission is to conduct outstanding research in Informatics and Computational Sciences and to ensure this research has an impact on society, tackling global challenges and addressing local needs. ATHENA Research Center studies a broad spectrum of research issues within these fields, including some raised by other sciences, industrial applications, or societal challenges. These include all areas of Informatics, Data Science, Robotics, Automation, Signal Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Digital Communication, and Modelling.

ATHENA Research Center is leading the work on the DataTools4Heart Integrated Platform, Virtual Assistants, and Sustainability. It is also a key contributor in the efforts on Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning and Synthetic Data Generation.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the national supercomputing centre in Spain. Barcelona Supercomputing Center specialises in High Performance Computing (HPC) and manages MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located in the Torre Girona chapel. Barcelona Supercomputing Center is at the service of the international scientific community and of industry that requires HPC resources and actively participates in the main European HPC initiatives, in close cooperation with other European supercomputing centres. Barcelona Supercomputing Center has extensive experience and research output in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a particular focus on clinical and biomedical application domains.

In DataTools4Heart, Barcelona Supercomputing Center will be working on the development of multilingual clinical NLP and text mining tools, ontology and concept normalization components, the construction of clinical language models, and the technical implementation work on federated learning strategies.

Bucharest Emergency Clinical Hospital, the first institution in Romania specialised in providing emergency medical care, is a university clinic with sustained scientific activity, where patients receive adequate medical care. Opened in 1933, funded by the Romanian Professor Nicolae Minovici in 1944, the hospital was destroyed during the bombing of Bucharest and rebuilt in 1949. Today, Bucharest Emergency Clinical Hospital is still operational and covers the entire palette of medical specialties. Because in modern medicine, the attending physician is dependent on numerous requested tests, analyses, and investigations, its system was created to make the requested medical data available, quickly, and completely.

Bucharest Emergency Clinical Hospital is involved in the DataTools4Heart project with a clinical study regarding the selection of treatment strategies for patients with anaemia and acute coronary syndromes. Their clinical experts are also guiding Natural Language Processing (NLP) experts in the construction of a Romanian language corpus for the field of cardiology.

European Society of Cardiology is an independent, non-profit organisation. Its members and decision-makers are busy healthcare professionals who volunteer their time and expertise. European Society of Cardiology represents more than 95,000 men and women in the field of cardiology from Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, and far beyond.

Within DataTools4Heart, European Society of Cardiology is playing a supporting role in dissemination activities. It will organise DataTools4Heart scientific sessions during its 14 annual cardiology related congresses, the drafting of DataTools4Heart medical press releases and other key project news.

Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli is the place where scientific and technical skills, human sensitivity, Catholic ethics and values, become a genuine commitment at the service of everyone, to guarantee excellent and affordable medical treatments to the entire community. Inaugurated on July 10, 1964, in a context of excellence where a highly prestigious academic quality, innovative research and care and assistance coexist in favour of patients. For over 50 years the Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli has been an integral part of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and on February 28, 2018, it has designated by Italian Ministry of Health as one of the IRCCS (Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico) centres, the Italian network of medical centres of excellence with primary scientific mission. Real World Evidence (RWE) generation is a top scientific priority at Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli with a dedicated Research Facility, Generator Real World Data, supporting internal and external research networks in clinical data governance, integration, and discovery. One of the prominent disease domains focused on RWE is the Department of Cardiovascular Science, which admits about 3500 patients per year, one of the four hub hospitals for the cardiovascular emergency in the Lazio region with a catchment area of about 1M of inhabitants.

Given the combination of the available expertise, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS role in DataTools4Heart will focus on the ingestion of own Electronic Health Records onto local instances of federated learning platform to enable federated learning algorithms, and elicitation of privacy requirements regarding data sharing and reuse.

International Clinical Research Center, as an integral part of the St. Anne’s University Hospital Brno, is a scientific research institution focusing on basic, pre-clinical, and clinical research searching for new diagnostic and therapeutic methods and technologies, particularly in the fields of cardiology, neurology, and oncology. ICRC employs over 400 people from 18 countries in 21 research teams and 6 core facilities. From July 2022, International Clinical Research Center became a joint workplace of the St. Anne’s University Hospital Brno and the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University (MU) in Brno.

St. Anne’s University Hospital Brno is one of the clinical centers which will contribute to the DataTools4Heart federated learning platform.

LYNKEUS S.r.l. is an independent strategy and business consultancy company specialised on eHealth solutions. LYNKEUS works to identify and promote the best cutting-edge technological solutions to complex socio-economic problems in a variety of areas related to technological applications in public policies, with a specific focus on healthcare. LYNKEUS shares specific expertise in the conception, management and execution of EU-funded projects including innovation and business strategy; project management; blockchain development and implementation; clinical decision support technologies; analysis and implementation of privacy enhancing technologies; synthetic data; legal and ethical compliance; dissemination and communication; exploitation and business planning.

In DataTools4Heart, LYNKEUS will be responsible for the development of effective and validated tools for generating high-utility synthetic Cardiology data with privacy guarantees together. In this context, LYNKEUS will also work on the strategic positioning, privacy issues, clinical and technical requirements of the project, coordinating the operational legal guidance on the processing of pseudonymised and synthetic health data. In addition, LYNKEUS will be leading the dissemination and exploitation activities.

PANETTA is an internationally recognized law firm specialized in the areas of new technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and privacy and data protection. More than 15 years ago, some of its professionals were among the first to deal with these issues under a legal perspective and to provide specific assistance to both domestic and cross-border clients in relation to complex technology transactions and projects.

PANETTA will lead the work aimed at ensuring the strategic positioning of DataTools4Heart, both in terms of data privacy and security compliance and implementation of state-of-the-art technologies, in line with clinical developments and expectations. In this sense, it will provide legal and ethical guidance in all phases of the project, ensuring proper consideration and fulfilment of the requirements set out by already applicable (e.g., General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR) or upcoming (e.g., AI Act) laws and regulations. As a final step, PANETTA will coordinate and take care of the drafting of a GDPR-based Code of Conduct on the reuse and sharing of health data for medical research purposes.

Region Stockholm is responsible for regional planning and cultural subsidies, public transport and all publicly financed healthcare in Stockholm County. Karolinska University Hospital is a part of Region Stockholm and one of the largest University Hospitals in Europe. Together with the world-respected Karolinska Institutet, Karolinska University Hospital leads the development and medical breakthroughs. The Department of Cardiology at Karolinska University Hospital has a leading role in care of cardiovascular diseases in Sweden and leads extensive research in the field in collaboration with the Department of Medicine at Karolinska Institutet.

In DataTools4Heart, Region Stockholm/Karolinska University Hospital validates the methodological tools designed by the other partners by applying them in clinical cases where the modalities of referral from/to cardiology departments are investigated and whether heart failure treatments are used in clinical practice according to the guidelines.

SIEMENS S.r.l. is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. From more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare, SIEMENS creates technology with purpose adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, SIEMENS empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, helping them to transform the everyday for billions of people.

In DataTools4Heart, SIEMENS is responsible for the development of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities for clinical information extraction and normalization. This process will be achieved through pre-training and fine tuning of contextual language models for named entity recognition, relation classification, and entity linking.

Software Research and Development Consultancy, established in 2007, is a spin-off company of the Middle East Technical University (METU). Software Research and Development Consultancy has a strong backing from METU for transferring the Computer Science research to industry as top-notch products. Its expertise areas include semantic and technical interoperability solutions for e-health, e-government, and e-business domains; enabling secondary use of electronic health records for Artificial Intelligence-enabled clinical research and analytics; building integrated care, chronic disease management solutions and clinical decision support systems; developing data analytics solutions and enabling conformance and interoperability testing.

Software Research and Development Consultancy is taking care of Data Ingestion and Harmonisation Tools in DataTools4Heart and will model the DataTools4Heart Common Data Model (CDM) in the Health Level 7 standards organization Fast Health Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR) to ensure structural and semantic interoperability across heterogeneous data sources, multiple Machine Learning (ML) models, and other DataTools4Heart tools such as the Virtual Assistant. Software Research and Development Consultancy will deliver Data Ingestion Tools to connect to heterogeneous data sources of the health data providers and ingest existing data to the CDM. It will also deliver Feature Extraction Suite to extract datasets from this CDM, as an input to the federated ML algorithms.

TRANSLATED is one of the largest pure online professional translation service providers of the world. It has translated over 1.2 million documents in 194 languages. This is made possible by helping its 200 000 translators with purpose-built technology such as real-time adaptive machine translation and a dedicated web-based translation interface. TRANSLATED serves from the very small (private persons, SMEs) to the very large (Uber, Google) customers, and has signed the largest private translation contract in the world in 2021 with Airbnb for 120 M$, to localize all its content to 61 languages.

In DataTools4Heart, TRANSLATED brings its expertise in multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the table and research algorithms and data to tackle the privacy problem when applied specifically to text, and more concretely in a multilingual setting. It is responsible for two main deliverables: Paraclite, a professionally curated multilingual aligned dataset derived from existing clinical text corpora, released early in the project in support to technology development; CardioSynth, a synthetic dataset built from generative models trained without privacy leaks on clinical data made available by clinical partners. TRANSLATED also works on a use-case to improve the SMART cardiovascular risk score from large clinical data by learning not just from hand-engineered indicators but also from freeform clinical notes.

University College London, member institution of the federal University of London and the second-largest university in the UK by total enrolment and the largest by postgraduate enrolment, is a public research university. Established in 1826, as London University, by founders inspired by the radical ideas of Jeremy Bentham, University College London was the first university institution to be established in London, and the first in England to be entirely secular and to admit students regardless of their religion. It was also among the first university colleges to admit women in 1878. Intended by its founders to be England’s third university, politics forced it to accept the status of a college in 1836, when it received a royal charter and became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London, although it achieved de facto recognition as a university in the 1990s. University College London has many notable alumni, including the founder of Mauritius, the first Prime Minister of Japan, and one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. As of 2022, 30 Nobel Prize winners and three Fields medallists have been affiliated with University College London as alumni, faculty, or researchers. University College London works in close partnership with University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The Clinical and Research Informatics Unit, part of the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Biomedical Research Centre, enables patients’ health records to be safely used for medical research while preserving patient privacy.

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the clinical centres which will contribute to the DataTools4Heart federated learning platform.

University Medical Center Utrecht is the academic hospital affiliated with the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. It comprises of an adult facility and a specialized children’s hospital (Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital). In total approximately 12,000 people work at the University Medical Center Utrecht including medical staff, nursing staff, residents, support personnel and researchers, making it one of the largest hospitals in the Netherlands. The department of cardiology and the Central Diagnostic Laboratory actively participate in the consortium. Both are a part of the Circulatory Health Research Center, which aims to (inter)nationally reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease, thereby focussing on improving the personalized prediction, prognosis, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Within the Central Diagnostic Laboratory, the Utrecht Patient Oriented Database (UPOD) was created in 2000, which is a unique relational database collecting and combining routine health care data such as clinical characteristics, medication and laboratory measurements. It encompasses data from more than 2,5M individuals (including paediatric patients).

University Medical Center Utrecht will play an important role in the DataTools4Heart consortium as one of the clinical leads. University Medical Center Utrecht has extensive expertise in the field of cardiology and access to electronic health record data. This is complemented by the experience in Machine Learning (ML) and clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Vall d’Hebron Hospital Research Institute is a public sector institution that promotes and develops biomedical research, innovation, and teaching at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital. Since 1994, it has been working to identify and implement new solutions to society’s health problems, achieving leadership and excellence in clinical and translational biomedical research in the national and international spheres.