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Improving Urologic Cancer Care
with Artificial Intelligence Solutions

The COMFORT Project

COMFORT: Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Cancer Detection and Treatment Decisions

When doctors diagnose and treat prostate or kidney cancer, they need to consider many pieces of information - from medical images and blood tests to previous illnesses and general health status. Making sense of all this information to choose the best treatment for each patient is becoming increasingly complex. This is where the COMFORT project comes in, developing new artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help doctors make more accurate and personalised decisions.

The COMFORT project brings together an international team of medical experts, computer scientists, and patient representatives from across Europe. Our mission is to create AI systems that can analyse different types of medical information together - like MRI scans, CT images, blood test results, and medical records - to better detect cancer and predict how it might progress.

What makes COMFORT special is that we're not just focusing on analysing medical images, which most current AI systems do. Instead, we're developing systems that can understand and combine many different types of medical information, much like how doctors think when making decisions. This "multimodal" approach could help identify patterns and connections that might be missed otherwise.



Working closely with doctors and patients, we're particularly focused on solving three main challenges:

  • Detecting cancer earlier and more accurately
  • Helping doctors distinguish between aggressive cancers that need immediate treatment and slower-growing ones that might be safely monitored
  • Predicting which treatments are most likely to work for each individual patient

We understand that trusting AI with important medical decisions can be concerning. That's why we're making sure our AI systems can explain their recommendations in ways that both doctors and patients can understand. We're also working directly with patients and doctors throughout the development process to ensure our tools meet their needs and concerns.

The project will test these new AI tools in several European hospitals, comparing their performance to current medical practices. This real-world testing is crucial to ensure our tools actually improve patient care in practice, not just in theory.

By the end of the project, we aim to have created trustworthy AI tools that can be used in hospitals across Europe, helping doctors make better decisions and ultimately improving outcomes for patients with prostate and kidney cancer.

This research is part of the European Union's commitment to fighting cancer and promoting innovative healthcare solutions. The COMFORT project brings together 16 partner institutions from 7 European countries, including leading hospitals, research institutions, and patient organisations, working together to improve cancer care for all Europeans.