This poster provides an overview of the current status of the project. The first main step is to elaborate whether the questions that needs to be addressed within the strategic research agenda are still the same as they had been identified during the preparation of the project proposal.
To do so, a first workshop has been organized in december 2020. During this workshop a consensus has been achieved regarding the potential topics of the SRA that will be developed during the course of the EURAMED rocc-n-roll project.
This workshop was due to the pandemic situation in Europe not possible to be held as a meeting in presence but was instead organized as an online event. The meeting infrastructure did work very well. Nevertheless, such an online meeting cannot completely replace a workshop in presence. On the other hand, it did make attendance much easier and thus potentially more interested people could attend. In addition, since the group of people participating were very active but strictly following the rules of the netiquette, the workshop was very effective. However, it is foreseen that as soon that the pandemic situation would allow that a face-to-face meeting should take place for refining the results of this workshop.
During the workshop the general concept of an SRA and a roadmap had been discussed. Afterwards for each aspect that is foreseen for the SRA as described in the project description the actual proposed content has been demonstrated and then be discussed in terms of whether things have to be changed, deleted or added. The final SRA will contain various parts as it has been described in the project description. The first part will be about the medical applications of ionizing radiation for different disease entities and the related research. It was highlighted during the workshop again that this needs to be strongly focussed based on a patient centered perspective and approach. The second part will focus on the corresponding needs of radiation protection in medical applications and the research needed with respect to these needs. The third part will look for the implementation of this medical oriented research into the broader field of radiation protection including radiation biology, dosimetry, safe use and guaranteed supply of radiopharmaceuticals as well as the regulators perspective. It will also look into the new opportunities and challenges of digitisation and ethical and social sciences approaches. That third part of the SRA document will also look for challenges like the difficulties to transfer the results of the research into products and finally into clinical practice and guarantee a harmonized use of medical applications of ionizing radiation throughout Europe. The final aspects to be dealt with in the strategic research agenda are the needs of corresponding education and training programmes as well as requirements for good scientific practice in the area of interest as well as the potential need for certain research infrastructures or even potential centers of excellence.
The next workshop that will take place even in february is dealing with the questions on infrastructures, the changes and challenges related to the digitisation in health care including the safe and efficient use of AI based methods for image reconstruction, dosimetry and Computer aided diagnosis like in radiomics as well as their perception by the patients and ethical questions related to the use of such new technologies or large scale data bases.
Then, there will be a workshop addressing the questions on which disease entities could trigger new developments for medical applications of ionizing radiation and about what will be the most urgent research topics in areas like oncology, cardiology, neurovascular diseases and pediatrics. EURAMED rocc-n-roll will try to approach these questions taking into account the possibilities and challenges of personalized medicine and e.g. molecular imaging developments.
Another workshop will look for the topic of current hurdles for translating research results into clinical practice and transfering it into industrial use of such results. Here, we will try to generate ideas for a framework to overcome such restrictions. This workshop will also try to define the questions which need to be addressed to achieve a better harmonized use of ionizing radiation for medical applications throughout Europe.
Regarding education and training in the fields of medical applications of ionizing radiation and the corresponding radiation protection a SWOT analysis of the current situation in Europe has already been performed. Based on that a survey has been developed, for which we do hope for a lot of input to be able to give guidance for future research projects in terms of suitable education and training concepts including concepts like train the trainers and more hands on training rather than pure theoretical education.
We have many organisations from relevant societies like ESR, EFRS, ESTRO, EANM and EFOMP, CIRSE, patient representative organisation, oncological societies as well as those representing cardiology etc in the consortium or the advisory board or and in the panels writing the chapters of the SRA and the roadmap. Also, members of the WHO, the IAEA, ICRP etc. take part in the discussions e.g. as members of the advisory board.