WIDTH · Warehousing images in the digital hospital (WIDTH): interpretation, infrastructure, and integration

Warehousing images in the digital hospital (WIDTH): interpretation, infrastructure, and integration

The WIDTH project has been completed successfully and achieved fruitful outcomes that in many ways are realised greater than expectations. In despite of a number of difficulties that faced the project, the progress remained unencumbered. Over the past 43 months of project duration, all the planned activities have been implemented victoriously involving around 80 personnel from 11 partners. In total, 163 person/month (83%) secondments have been accomplished while addressing 9 work packages; among them 38 are females (47.5%). As a direct result, more than 80 scientific publications are accountable for eventuated directly from the collaborative work between WIDTH partners (Objective 2), which are published in both reputable journals and refereed international conferences. Two workshops have been organised within WIDTH project whereas four more are in collaboration with other EU funded projects on medical images, with a number of proceedings published in Books, e.g., Lecture Notes in Computer Science, a reputable series published by the Springer. In addition, three PhD candidates are awarded the Doctor of Philosophy as the direct result of WIDTH secondments, highlighting the amazing achievement in realising the overarching goal of Marie Curie People Scheme of training young people (Objective 1). Significantly, a number of funding have been secured by the Chinese visitors when they are back to China after their secondments in Europe, leading to the knowledge transfer between two continents (Objective 3). The project constitutes a small but highly significant step towards training young people and networking scientists from multi-disciplinary fields and different countries in support of healthy wellbeing, in particular in the current economic climate. As a training and exchange project, the WIDTH has implemented several training programmes, workshops in addition to a large number of secondments, which are summarized below. • All in all, all the planned deliveries are fulfilled, as entailed in the previous three reports (Appendix 4-A). • Specifically, knowledge exchange seminars and briefings have been given throughout the project, taking place in both Europe and China. Specifically, around 30 presentations are given to junior researchers during varying secondment visits (Appendix 4-B). • When WIDTH started in May 2011, a project kick-off meeting took place in July at the coordinator institute, Middlesex University, UK. In total, 4 Chinese and 4 European partners have made effort coming to the UK to join the meeting (Appendix 4-A). • In addition, half-way through the project, a workshop was organised in Greece, which attracted around 20 delegates from 9 partner institutes, making the workshop a great success (Appendix 4-A). • Three PhD candidates who participated in the secondments have successfully been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Without these visits to the partner institutes to collect much needed datasets, their developed theories would have not been confirmed. They are Dr. Sergey Anishchenko, and Dr. Rui Hui, from Middlesex University, UK, who took secondments in China General Navy Hospital (GNH) for 3 and 12 months respectively, and Dr. Lu Zhang from the Capital University of Medical Science, China who embarked her visit to Pisa University Medicine School at Italy in 2011 for 12 months. They have successfully subsequently been awarded PhD in December, 2012, December, 2014, and July 2013 respectively (Appendix 4-C). • Workshops on CBIR co-organised by Switzerland partner Prof. Müller took place every year with many participants. The proceedings are published by the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series (Appendix 4-D, sample proceedings). • An online image retrieval system with external facing interface at http://image.mdx.ac.uk, which will remain life in perpetuity. • Outreach activities also took place where two Chinese groups of delegate were in the UK in 2014 and specifically paid a visit to the WIDTH project. They are from the China Space Administration and Chongqing Municipality City Planning Bureau respectively. Main results from the last 7 months: • More than 10 scientific papers published collaboratively directly as the result of the WIDTH exchange program. • More than 30 person/month secondments have been undertaken. • A workshop on Medical image retrieval will be co-organised on March 29, 2015, where 2 papers from WIDTH partners are to be presented. Impacts: • Partnership’s contribution to the area of collaboration: As a cross-disciplinary project, the partners have learnt from each other by producing a number of high quality multi-disciplinary papers (Appendix 4-E , papers) • Chinese partners: During the project, Chinese partners had the opportunity to visit some leading EU hospitals and to learn their advanced medical imaging systems. For example, they visited University of Pisa Medical School while enjoying the conference CARS hosted by Pisa University that has led many EU projects on tele-medicine. The Chinese partners also presented their work to their counterparts to raise their personal profiles. In particular, several delegates have received substantial grant from China when they are back from Europe. For example, Dr. Yu Ma from Fudan Unversity, who visited Switzerland, Italy, Norway and Greece, and Dr. Liqin Huang from Fuzhou University, who seconded in the UK. • EU partners: EU partners have gained many valuable experiences and data during their visits to China. Further collaboration has been formed with more joined publications on the way. Significantly, one of the WIDTH partner, Prof. Thomas Deserno from Aachen Hospital University, Germany, has been awarded another EU grant on RASimAs project (http://www.rasimas.eu/ ) on Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union