BigMedilytics

Big Data Analytics for COPD and Asthma

COPD is the third greatest cause of death globally, while Asthma the most common long-term respiratory condition affecting over 30 million people in Europe. In the UK, Asthma and COPD are the biggest burden during the winter term with the highest patients' hospital and emergency loads.

Our specific goal is to develop robust and highly performing predictors of COPD and Asthma exacerbation events using advanced machine learning and Big Data analytics. This will be a breakthrough, once achieved, as we strongly believe that the prediction of exacerbation events at patient level will revolutionise care and contribute in the emerging 21st century concept of personalised medicine. The delivery of timely exacerbation event alerts with specific contextual information about patients to clinicians, community nursing teams and pharmaceutical companies will save lives and reduce the cost of care across hospitals in the UK.

The COPD/Asthma pilot in BigMedilytics has various Big Data challenges to overcome. These include the automatic access and aggregation to ever increasing volumes of data from heterogeneous data sources such as weather, atmospheric pollution, patients' primary and secondary care, together with contextual information on patients’ lifestyles. Once acquired, the Big Data needs to be intelligently mined with the discovery of the most important data features for the development of performing machine learning algorithms. These will detect and understand the principal factors that trigger COPD or Asthma exacerbation events in individual patients.