Q: Dr Sgandurra, can you tell us about the role of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in medicine and how it is relevant today for clinicians?

A: In recent years, we are witnessing an enormous development of technology that is applied in many areas of our lives, from communication to education to aspects of well-being and fitness, influencing the way we live. At the same time, technologies are also playing a very important role in the clinical setting, providing support to doctors in health promotion and prevention, but also in diagnosis and treatment.

Indeed, technological advances in the clinical field have involved both instruments and equipment but, above all, have favoured the introduction of new biomedical and information technologies: for example medical devices that use virtual reality or new information technology systems and communication (ICT), leading to the growing use of intelligent digital technologies, such as apps and wearable sensors. All of this is part of the technological innovation process that is opening up horizons towards a Personalized Medicine (PM) approach.

In this framework, to date, a highly crucial role has also been assumed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) which allows the analysis of a large amount of data. In particular, AI-based solutions can improve understanding of the complex relationships between various domains (for example, standardised clinical assessments with motion measurements from wearable sensors, to measurements of brain stroke size and location at MRI cerebral magnetic) allowing both a "functional" diagnosis understood as the possibility of evaluating the child by putting together its functioning in all areas, and to detect changes more accurately, and to allow a more personalized rehabilitation.

Q: What is the scope of the AINCP project and the role of AI?

A: The project is very broad and complex: it aims to develop an ethical and sustainable decision-making process to provide a personalized and validated approach for the monitoring and tele-rehabilitation of hemiplegia in children with cerebral palsy, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence.

It is on the basis of the new discoveries and models mentioned above that AINCP is the first and largest European project to be funded under the Horizon Europe programme. It aims to develop and validate from a clinical point of view new artificial intelligence algorithms to develop clinical tools of support in the decision-making process (the so-called decision support tools) based on evidence, for the functional diagnosis of children with hemiplegia.

It will build tele-rehabilitation systems at home, capable not only of carrying out the personalized evaluation of the clinical motor profile of the child but also to set up the personalized rehabilitation treatment of "action observation therapy (AOT)", a new rehabilitation model based on the functioning of mirror neurons which is based on the role of observation of significant actions followed by their immediate execution as a model for learning . The AOT has already given significant results in the upper limb rehabilitation of children with hemiplegia and has received a strong positive recommendation based on the standard evaluation scale “GRADE”. The AInCP project aims to develop a highly technological system for carrying out AOT directly at home.

AINCP is a significant example of a transdisciplinary approach thanks to a consortium in which clinicians, data scientists, physicists, engineers, economists, ethics experts, small and medium-sized enterprises, children and parents' associations will work, all together in a synergical way for co-creation of diagnostic and rehabilitative approaches, highly innovative, clinically validated and capable of being sustainable and adequate to the reality of European health systems.

Dr. Giuseppina Sgandurra researcher at the University of Pisa and Head of the INNOVATE Laboratory of the Stella Maris Foundation