AI platform to help devise new treatment approaches

The AIRIS project will receive €16.9 million in funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme over the next four years, with the goal of helping researchers to learn more about how certain illnesses affect the body, in order to point to potential new ways of treating the diseases.

Those from UCL involved in the project will be working with a total of 21 institutions across Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Professor Joseph Jacob (UCL Division of Medicine & UCL Hawkes Institute), whose computational imaging laboratory will be used in the project, said: “In this international collaboration, the Satsuma Lab at the UCL Hawkes Institute will be quantifying anatomical structures in lung tissue imaged at multiple scales.

“The scales range from clinical computed tomography imaging to microscale imaging with an aim to better characterise how disease modifies structures in the lung.

“The imaging information we derive will be linked to molecular analyses using generative artificial intelligence tools to better understand how disease develops and progresses mechanistically across a range of chronic lung diseases.

“Central tenets of the project include transparency, robustness, explainability, bias detection and mitigation, and technical oversight of the AI systems to align them with patient and clinical values and health priorities.”

To show how the AIRIS platform can be applied across different medical disciplines, the project aims to explore five disease areas whose biological mechanisms are not fully understood: pulmonary fibrosis, steatotic liver disease, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and inflammatory bowel disease.

In doing so, the project hopes to uncover unknown disease pathways and translate them into research hypotheses which can then be investigated in future studies.

Professor Emmanuel Tsochatzis (UCL Division of Medicine) said: “Steatotic liver disease (SLD) is the most common form of liver disease, potentially affecting around 30% of the UK adult population.

“Our team has conducted extensive research over many years to improve the early detection and risk stratification of people with the condition, contributing to meaningful changes in clinical practice.

“Steatotic liver disease is one of five priority disease areas in which the new AI platform will be evaluated.

“By bringing our clinical and research expertise to this collaboration, we aim to generate important new insights into how the disease develops and progresses over time, ultimately helping to improve the identification and care of people at greatest risk.”

Christos Diou, Project Coordinator for the AIRIS Platform, said: “Moving beyond today’s AI systems, our new tool will act as a virtual collaborator capable of helping scientists access and harmonise data, explore disease mechanisms, generate and test hypotheses, and design rigorous studies.”

Links

• Professor Joseph Jacob’s UCL Research Profile
• Professor Emmanuel Tsochatzis’ Research Profile
• UCL Division of Medicine
• UCL Faculty of Medical Sciences
• UCL Hawkes Institute

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