A federated paradigm of real-world data sources utilization for the empowerment of diagnosis, prognosis and risk assessment of cardiovascular conditions

In the EU more than 6 million new cardiovascular disease (CVD) cases are reported yearly, along with 1.8 million related deaths, posing a substantial burden on the national healthcare systems and society in general. Development of effective preventive interventions, adopted for each individual and population, will not only reduce the overall cost of patient management, but will also justify the assertion that CVDs could be ultimately prevented and controlled. The exploration of existing clinical, genetic and real-world data sources can contribute to this direction, however several challenges related to the data availability, management and processing remain open. The 48-month project CVDLINK aims to tackle these challenges by implementing a privacy-by-design European-wide federated platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for the delivery of effective data-driven human-centric interventions and the advancement of research and management in the CVD domain. CVDLINK is based on two major offerings: (1) the seamless and legally compliant linking and integration, secure sharing and automated curation of existing data; and (2) a set of AI and data-enabled precision medicine tools and pipelines, for better diagnosis, risk stratification and treatment. In the context of the project, 7 different cardiovascular conditions will be examined, making use of different retrospective datasets, cohort studies and biobanks from 7 counties, aiming to set a paradigm of the how heterogeneous data sources, can be effectively exploited for building comprehensive AI-driven tools, in order to bring substantial benefits for health systems, patients, industry and EU citizens. The developed tools will be prospectively validated in 5 countries, demonstrating the impact of CVDLINK. Additionally, a set of best practices will be generated, which along with a cost-effectiveness analysis, and systematic raising awareness campaigns will promote its wide adoption in the mid-term.