Recent Advances in Computer Science

Computational automation in modern personalized medicine - AirPROM project prespective Michal Kierzynka, Marcin Adamski, Andreas Fritz, Dmitriy Galka, Ian Jones, Dieter Maier, Andrew Wells and the AirPROM Consortium

Abstract—Modern medicine therapies tend to generate and rely on an immense amount of data that are usually produced by CT, MRI and other imaging techniques as well as genetic data coming from NGS sequencing. In order to plan a patientspecific therapy these data need to be efficiently analyzed and interpreted per individual subject. The EU-founded AirPROM project (Airway Disease Predicting Outcomes through Patient Specific Computational Modeling) is a prime example of joint cooperation that aims to develop tools to predict the progression of selected diseases and response to treatment in the area of respiratory medicine. This would not be possible without support of computer science methods. In particular, a lot of effort has been spent to integrate different software tools and present them to specialists in a form of one unified system that may be used without in depth ICT knowledge. This paper presents selected tools and techniques used to achieve this goal. Index Terms—personalized medicine, asthma, COPD, automation, high performance computing, OpenStack cloud systems, international projects

I. I NTRODUCTION

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N the recent years modern ICT technologies have tremendously improved many areas of life, including medicinerelated sectors. In particular, advanced medical imaging, simulation and statistical software tools analyzing large DICOM and genomic data sets have benefited most from this development. As a result, the personalized medicine has evolved from being only a future dream to almost everyday reality. However, these advances would not be possible without a wide support from the ICT sector. Sometimes it takes a supercomputing center to analyze all the data coming from a hospital. Moreover, dedicated computational workflows are needed in order to save time by making the computations as automatic as possible, remembering that someone’s health depends on them. One important application area for these techniques is respiratory medicine. Lung diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affect the lives of over 500 million people worldwide [1] and costs the European Union alone more than 56 billion euros per year. Even though doctors have access to an immense amount of information and M. Kierzynka is with Pozna´n Supercomputing and Networking Center and with Pozna´n University of Technology, Institute of Computing Science, Pozna´n, Poland, e-mail: [email protected] M. Adamski is with Pozna´n Supercomputing and Networking Center, Pozna´n, Poland A. Fritz is with Biomax Informatics AG, Munich, Germany D. Galka is with Materialise NV, Kiev, Ukraine I. Jones is with ANSYS, Inc., Oxford, UK D. Maier is with Biomax Informatics AG, Munich, Germany A. Wells is with ANSYS, Inc., Oxford, UK

ISBN: 978-1-61804-320-7

data regarding these diseases, few new therapies have been developed [2], [3]. The AirPROM project aims to develop tools to predict the progression of disease and response to treatment for individual subjects. The project aims also at building multiscale simulation models of the whole airway system, as a new way of characterizing asthma and COPD. Ultimately, this leads to a personalized treatment, i.e. the ability to find the best possible treatment for each patient. In order to make things happen for a large number of patients and still keep the whole process transparent and understandable, the project is assisted by a Knowledge Management (KM) platform connected to a cloud-based OpenStack storage system, where the actual data are stored. Using the portal doctors may browse individual patient’s data and start simulations with desired parameters, e.g. ANSYS LungModeller, on a high performance remote computing system using the QCG infrastructu