Sapienza University has a new futuristic medical research centre. STITCH, the Sapienza Information-Based Technology Innovation Centre for Health, employs information technology to advance medicine through network medicine, big data, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and robotics. The new centre, which was inaugurated on Monday, September 17, has been created through the organisation of three departments from the engineering, computer science and medicine areas.

“Artificial intelligence and data-driven approaches in general are today at the centre of both academic and industrial focus,” points out Sapienza Rector Eugenio Gaudio. “In particular, exploiting the availability of big data and transferring methodologies developed in computer science into medicine require profound synergy of intents and programmes. Sapienza has the advantage of possessing multiple specialist competences and an interdisciplinary vocation that make the university a particularly fertile environment for the development of “intelligent solutions.”

The new Sapienza STITCH Centre will apply innovative information technology and computer science techniques to various areas of modern medicine and promote research and clinical activities in strategic high-impact areas.

In terms of diagnostic imaging, artificial intelligence and the data mining techniques that identify information that often eludes the human eye, for example, we are working on the management of data concerning the elasticity and stress of arterial walls to predict, in patients with aneurisms or aortic dissections, the risk of complications and subsequent mini-invasive aortic stenting. In the diagnosis of scoliosis, innovative methodologies, such as rastereography, which provides various qualitative parameters describing a patient’s posture without recurring to radiation, require a coded system to analyse and interpret a large quantity of parameters obtained in a single operation.

In clinical medicine, avant-garde techniques allow doctors to provide patients with custom-tailored therapy, increasing their possibility of reacting successfully to a given drug and avoiding inefficient and potentially toxic treatments with a lower success rate. This is often referred to as “precision medicine” or “people medicine,” a new approach to curing that improves the treatment of common pathologies with a significant social impact, such as hypertension, diabetes and tumours. 

In fact, the inaugural workshop will address “Information Technology for Precision Medicine,” the first STITCH Project developed by the “Antonio Ruberti” Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering (DIAG).

The STITCH Centre will organise didactic activities, innovating degree programmes and promote the university’s third mission, providing bio-informatics core facility services to external users, organising professional updating courses and creating spin-offs for the transferral of research results to clinical practice. This is an important new step forward that will drive the Sapienza’s competitiveness in advanced bio-medicine and make the university a reference point for the biomedical industry.