Third project meeting – Athens, Greece
On October 3rd, the MES-CoBraD consortium met for their second physical meeting in Athens, Greece. The meeting ran for two days, guided by a rich agenda reviewing technical and scientific progress, with focused planning for the project’s remaining 18 months.
On day one, the consortium spent most of the day assessing the project’s technical progress. Here, we had the first demonstration of the MES-CoBraD platform and some of its core capabilities. This ignited much discussion about future developments and how its functionality would be deployed by clinicians.
The project’s technical lead, Antonino Sirchia, remarked “During the first day, the technological partners presented the first version of the MES-CoBraD platform. The road is drawn, and much valuable feedback has been collected to further improve the platforms efficiency, effectiveness, and usability. Further analysis has been done about the Real World Data to use, about the GDPR compliance, and personal data management and about analytics and visualizations. Many interesting things will come in the upcoming months.”
The second day was hosted by the medical partners. We started by taking a close look at the different sources of Real World Data and a status update on each, with the partners sharing experiences and progress. As well as reviewing specific work packages, the project’s working groups presented their work and the project’s scientific output was planned. Scientific lead, Elissaios Karageorgiou had this to say: “An exciting last day for the MES-CoBraD Project’s 3rd progress meeting, reviewing data source accessibility, exploitation, and scientific and social innovation implementation and impact. I am very pleased to see that we have verified the progress and accessibility of RWD uploading in secure and depersonalized ways on the MES-CoBraD Platform, the formation of concrete strategic plans on exploitation strategies in collaboration with other Horizon EU Projects, we abide to ethical principles in AI implementations and practices, and that we have started to produce scientific knowledge with an impact on Complex Brain Disorders guided by stakeholder engagement and feedback.”
Now the project is at its halfway point, the partners are in the midst of the implementation phase and the meeting allowed the group to reflect on this point, plan for future developments and the eventual dissemination.
Christos Ntanos, project coordinator, reflected on the meeting and progress of the project: “The 3rd MES-CoBraD Project Meeting organised by the Neurological Institute of Athens (NIA) was a great success. It gave clinical partners a chance to have their first glimpse at the integrated MES-CoBraD platform and the status of its developed features. The technical partners seized the opportunity to collect feedback to enhance and improve the software, while partners discussed and brainstormed on the practical side of ethics, Artificial Intelligence in medicine, gender, and the scientific method as applied in medicine. The project partners were overjoyed for the chance to work closely and amicably in a hospitable environment near the centre of Athens.”
We would like to echo this message and again thank our hosting partner NIA. We look forward to meeting again in the new year.