The Brain Supporters Project: a system to support diagnosis of brain lesions of suspected infectious origin, in transplanted patients, starting from a database and a set of radiologic image analysis tools

Brain infections in patients undergoing haemopoietic stem cell transplants or solid organ transplants are very complex to deal with and lead to higher mortality rates. The Brain Supporters Project aims at creating an international database of radiologic images of brain lesions together with clinical, laboratory and microbiological data. Starting from this database we’ll develop an ‘intelligent’ software that through the use of multidimensional analysis techniques, variational methods and classification procedures, can detect, highlight and differentiate the minimal and yet peculiar differences in the ‘radiologic footprint’ connected with the local alterations of brain tissue produced by each individual pathogen, thus becoming an objective diagnostic aid. Material and methods. An internet site has been created, www.brainsupporters.eu, freely accessible to transplant centres world-wide. The radiologic images with confirmed diagnosis collected in the database(hosted on CNR-ISMAR, Venice) will then be subject to a blind evaluation by a team of specialists. Results. The images will then be classified by aetiologic agent and subsequently by age group and by clinical characteristics of the patients. It will thus be possible to evaluate if and how the ‘radiologic footprint’ of lesions due to the same pathogen is modified depending on the different characteristics of the host. Discussion and conclusions. The database is now online. We are sending invitations to every relevant centre, inserting our data in the database and we started working on data analysis tools with the following objective: obtain the probability of presence of the most spread pathological agents.