Barco

Kortrijk, Belgium, 16 September 2022 – Yesterday, research project IMPACT has received the ITEA Award of Excellence for Innovation in Helsinki. IMPACT is a collaborative project that consists of 14 partners, among which Barco, led by Philips.

ITEA connects large and small businesses, academia and customer organizations. Together, these partners can work on research and development projects, specifically focused on software innovation. Project IMPACT was one of those projects. It gathered 14 partners from Belgium, The Netherlands and Sweden and ran from October 2018 until September 2021.

IMPACT: some context

Nowadays, instead of working with standard treatment plans, medical teams will try to specify a patient's condition in as much detail as possible and start up a more personalized plan. The goal is to speed up the treatment process and make it more effective.

A result of this more detailed approach is that medical professionals, both diagnosing and treating patients, need to work with much more different types of information; and this in a climate where many healthcare organizations struggle with strict budgets and limited staff.

What was IMPACT all about?

Project IMPACT centered around data intelligence as a solution to this combination of personalization and multidisciplinary work. Which automations and improvements can benefit the individual patient and the medical team surrounding them? The team focused on this question in clinical uses cases on cardiac treatment, liver oncology and brain oncology.

The result was several breakthroughs in areas as diverse as personalized diagnosis, minimally invasive surgery, and human-data interaction. Each partner brought along their own expertise. With the support of VLAIO, Barco participated with research into an 'application-agnostic' display system, which can automatically calibrate various image modalities in flexible layouts, according to the specific clinical case.

Award of Excellence

The research project has now been completed, and the team has received an ITEA Award of Excellence for Innovation. The partners can now continue building on this and investigate whether the outcomes could be translated into a business plan.

Tom Kimpe, VP of Technology and Innovation at Barco, reacts: "Project IMPACT projects fostered fruitful collaborations, with excellent results. That is clear from the demonstrations, publications and presentations it sprouted. We were happy to join forces with different players in the field and share knowledge and insights. We can really consider the project a great success for everyone involved."

The IMPACT project has received funding from ITEA and VLAIO under grant agreement No. VLAIO HBC.2018.0318 – ITEA 17021.