Consortium

Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), The Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) is one of the largest research centres of Greece with well-organized facilities and highly qualified staff. It functions under the supervision of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Hellenic Ministry of Development. The Foundation, with its high-quality research results as well as its valuable socioeconomic contribution, makes it one of the top research centres internationally. The Institute of Computer Science (ICS), one of the seven institutes of FORTH, has a relatively long history and recognized tradition, since its establishment in 1983, in conducting basic and applied research, developing applications and products, providing services, and playing a leading role in Greece and internationally, in the fields of Information and Communication Technologies. Our activities cover important research and development areas, taking into consideration new perspectives, emerging fields of research and technological challenges worldwide. FORTH-ICS has achieved excellence by establishing a balance among its various activities, and in particular: (i) basic and applied research, (ii) development of large-scale applications exploiting the results of research, (iii) development of products and services, (iv) cooperation with other research institutions and the private sector, (v) participation in national and European research and development projects, as well as in collaborative projects with industry. It is highly competitive at an international level, and many of its activities are carried out in the context of European collaborative research and development projects, which emphasize the development of Information Society Technologies and infrastructures in a number of domains of national importance and regional interest. Its activities cover important research and development topics in the framework of the emerging Information Society and it places special emphasis on education and training, by providing a significant number of scholarships to undergraduate and postgraduate students and by training numerous professionals in cutting-edge Information and Communication Technologies.  

The Computational BioMedicine Laboratory (CBML) at FORTH-ICS has established a tradition of internationally acknowledged excellence in conducting high-level R&D work and in developing innovative systems and services. Its research activities focus on the development of innovative computer methods and tools in the area of medical and biomedical informatics, computational medicine, e-health, m-Health, medical imaging and bioinformatics. The mission of CBML is to develop novel ICT technologies in the wider context of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine aiming at: the optimal management of chronic diseases (such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease) and the development of clinical decision support systems, the optimization of diagnosis and treatment through the use of novel medical imaging analysis tools and predictive models, the integration of multi-level biomedical data for supporting post genomic clinical trials, the integration of in vitro, in vivo and clinical data with mathematical and computational approaches to better understand cancer complexity and progression, the implementation of well-established in silico methods and tools towards novel approaches that could be incorporated in the medical clinical research, the understanding of spatio-temporal neuronal dynamics of the brain reflecting different perceptual, motor or cognitive states that may be indicative of a wider range of cognitive functions or brain pathologies, the semantic interoperability of biomedical data tools and models for enhancing biomedical knowledge discovery. The mission of the Computational BioMedicine Laboratory (CBML) is to develop novel ICT technologies in the wider context of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine aiming at the optimal management of chronic diseases (such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease) and the development of clinical decision support systems, optimization of diagnosis and treatment through the use of novel medical imaging analysis tools and predictive models, integration of multi-level biomedical data for supporting postgenomic clinical trials, integration of in vitro, in vivo and clinical data with mathematical and computational approaches to better understand cancer complexity and progression, implementation of well-established in silico methods and tools towards novel approaches that could be incorporated in the medical clinical research, understanding of spatio-temporal neuronal dynamics of the brain reflecting different perceptual, motor or cognitive states that may be indicative of a wider range of cognitive functions or brain pathologies, semantic interoperability of biomedical data tools and models for enhancing biomedical knowledge discovery, theoretical and algorithmic research in areas of bioinformatics to improve the state- of-the-art and invent solutions to new problems, applications of the state-of-the-art and best-practices in computational methods on specific biological problems with the intent to discover new biomedical knowledge, and support Translation BioMedical methodologies. Through its involvement in the healthcare domain it has developed specialized eHealth applications and services, which initially operated in the region of Crete as pilot, and since 1998 have been deployed and are operating in many healthcare organizations throughout Greece, including specialized software for Integrated Primary Health Care, Picture Archiving and Communication, pre-Hospital Emergency Care, access to Integrated Electronic Health Record services, and applications for the Citizen. All these active research directions are supported by several EC and national grants as well as a number of strategic clinical collaborations ensuring that the research output is driven from the actual clinical requirements and be translated to the clinical setting. Our mission is to contribute through our technology to the expected transformation of medicine making disease more preventable and treatment outcome more predictable, effective and personalized.