Our vision is to develop a suite of standardised non-invasive devices that will provide essential information about brain health in neurocritical care and neuromonitoring, with a particular emphasis on 1. traumatic brain injury: the “silent epidemic of the third millennium” and 2. hypoxia in newborn children. Survivors present permanent neurological conditions that have a profound impact on the quality of life of individuals and their families, and hence a large socio-economic impact. The key factors influencing these conditions and their treatment are the avoidance of brain hypoxia and metabolic disturbances and this is driving the transfer of new neuromonitoring systems to the bedside where they are being shown to have a transformative effect on patient care. BitMap will develop non-invasive photonics-based monitoring techniques and data analysis methods to provide biomarkers that could guide patient management. A cohort of multi-disciplinary Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), embedded in leading laboratories across Europe, will work together on an programme designed to address the key technological and clinical challenges in neurocritical care. The ESRs will benefit from the diverse range of expertise in advanced photonics and clinical application which will substantially enhance their research competitiveness and employability, and will together form a critical mass of skilled people working together towards new technologies for improved neuroclinical care. The challenges involved are fundamentally multi-disciplinary and therefore ESRs trained in a multi-disciplinary environment are essential if progress and clinical impact is to be made. There is currently no graduate programme producing researchers with these attributes, but there is a significant market for such PhDs in the rapidly developing area of biomedical optics and in general in medical imaging technology development. The BitMap project therefore addresses both a clinical and economic need.

Breast cancer (BC) incidence in women produces more than 600,000 deaths each year. The primary cause of death in BC patients is metastasis, whereby cancer cells spread from their primary site of origin and grow in adjacent or distant sites. Distant metastasis produced due to the relapse of the illness is incurable, underscoring the inadequacy of our understanding of its mechanisms. The first step for fighting against disease progression is screening programs for BC focused on image analysis of mammography, MRI and tomosynthesis. Once the tumour has been diagnosed and given the high variability of clinical progressions, another problem arises: classifying the cancer type and determining the proper treatment for specific cancer. Moreover, in BC, the immune response from the tumour microenvironment has played an essential role in tumour evolution. To evaluate the tumour and its microenvironment, one technique garnered a lot of attention in the last years: Whole Slide Imaging (WSI). This technique replaces the use of the microscope for classical diagnosis. Still, it has also been used for developing biomarkers that allow the analysis of tumours and classification of cancer subtypes and the study of the immune tumour microenvironment. The use of WSI has applications for predicting the probability of relapse for distant metastasis. Now, for the first time, BosomShield proposes to join the two disciplines (pathological and radiological imaging) in a software that will analyze these images to classify the cancer subtypes and predict (together with the complete clinical history of the patient) the probability of relapse for distant metastasis. Besides, BosomShield will provide high-level training in BC research to young researchers by offering the necessary transferable skills for thriving careers underpinned using diverse disciplines, digital radiology and pathology, biomedical, AI, privacy and software development.