Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are incurable intestinal diseases in which changes in the intestinal mucosa cause inflammation that permanently weakens the intestinal tissue. Both diseases are considered to be the main representatives of the so-called chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). About 20 percent of those affected fall ill in the first twenty years of their lives; they are often younger than ten. In children and adolescents in particular, it is important to start effective therapy quickly, since the disease endangers physical, psychosocial and professional development.
In the future, new e-health technologies based on extensive data from the patient register CEDATA of the specialist pediatric gastroenterological society will help to care for young patients. With almost 1.3 million euros from the innovation fund, the Federal Joint Committee, the highest self-governing body in the German health care system, is funding a research project by scientists from the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and the TH Mittelhessen.
Under the leadership of Dr. Jan De Laffolie, Head of Pediatric Gastroenterology, among other things, the existing data should be consolidated and supplemented with new data sets and analysis methods in order to find out whether individual care deficits can be reduced in this way. “We have a duty to provide the best possible care for children and young people with IBD,” emphasizes De Laffolie. "To do this, we have to network and learn from the data we collect and analyze together in order to make life with the disease even easier for patients."
As project manager at THM , Prof. Dr. Keywan Sohrabi and Prof. Dr. Volker Groß from the Health Department is contributing her expertise in the areas of big data, data mining and e-health to the research network. “Medical informatics is now able to process huge amounts of data. This opens up completely new perspectives for the future of medicine. For example, we can draw conclusions for individual therapy from the analysis of anonymized patient databases,” explains Sohrabi. The team of scientists is supported by Prof. Dr. Henning Schneider, dean of the Health Department at THM and head of the Institute for Medical Informatics at JLU.
In the course of the project, the acceptance of the online register should also be increased. In addition, big data should help to develop new algorithms to support doctors in their therapy decisions. CEDATA is a patient register managed by the Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition and has been collecting clinical and paraclinical diagnostic and therapy data from children and adolescents with IBD since 2004. A total of around 4,500 children and young people and around 35,000 patient contacts were documented. Techniques and analyzes from the field of e-health and big data are particularly suitable for recognizing different disease situations across the board.