INESC TEC tool improves surgery planning for patients with breast cancer

INESC TEC tool improves surgery planning for patients with breast cancer

INESC TEC’s Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM) is participating in project BCCT.plan, in partnership with the Champalimaud Foundation and ENERMETER. The goal with this projects is to develop a surgical planning tool to be used by medical teams, and help them to explore different surgical treatment strategies and offer personalised treatment.

20th September 2016

The project starts in November 2016 and has a duration of three years.

The BCCT.plan is a continuation of European project PICTURE, also led by INESC TEC. In PICTURE, the focus was on models that predict surgical results. The BCCT.plan, on the other hand, will focus more on planning and on tools that will help surgical teams plan treatments in a personalised way, using radiology imaging, surface images and man-machine interface.

With the tool, to be created by CTM, surgeons will be able to compare how the breast will look with the different surgical options. The tool will use a combination of realistic 3D models of the patient’s surface and, and associating simple measurements of the tumour (size and location) and breast density, obtained through radiology imaging, it will obtain a complete 3D model of the breast. For that it will be necessary to create a database containing radiology imaging annotated by radiology professionals, and information about the breast’s surface.

The CTM team involved in the project features Hélder Oliveira, Jaime Cardoso, Luís Teixeira and João Teixeira. The project has secured 290 thousand euros worth of funding from a total of 780 thousand euros from Portugal 2020.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC and UP-FEUP.

INESC TEC, September 2016