Project: Personalized Atrial Fibrillation Risk Of Ischemic Stroke Assessment And Disease Trajectory Projection; Towards A Unified Machine-learning-based Clinical Index

Acronym	PARIS (Reference Number: ID35)
Duration	01/07/2020 - 31/12/2023
Project Topic	Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is a complex cardiac disease characterized by chaotic electrical activation and loss of atrial contraction, which creates a hemodynamic environment that is prone to clot formation and a six-fold increase in risk of ischemic stroke. AF is gaining epidemic proportions and currently affects more than 6 million Europeans, with an annual cost exceeding €13.5 billion, and the number of patients expected to double by 2030. The majority of AF patients are prescribed anticoagulants that markedly reduce stroke incidence, but at the cost of increased risk of severe bleedings. Individualized anticoagulation management remains a major challenge, and current risk scores for stratifying stroke and bleed risk (e.g. CHA₂DS₂-VASc, HAS-BLED) show poor performance. The current risk scores are based on population-level statistical correlations only, do not account for the underlying mechanisms of clot formation, and routinely available patient-specific clinical data are under-utilized. Computational models of the atria have reached a high level of sophistication, and include advanced statistical representations of atrial morphology and motion, as well as biophysically detailed models of tissue- and fluid dynamics. Model-based tools for diagnosis and prediction are emerging, but remain insufficiently validated and tested to be used for individualized clinical predictions. PARIS will utilize existing medical records of AF patients with known clinical outcome, to tune and validate computer models and predictive machine learning methods in an iterative process. The resulting decision support system will be validated retrospectively by predicting individualized disease outcome in a matched case-control cohort. The ambition is to identify biomarkers that correlate with stroke, bleeding and other severe complications, and to prospectively outperform the current risk score to reduce individual bleeds by optimizing personalized treatment and clinical follow-up.
Network	ERACoSysMed
Call	3rd Joint Transnational Call for European Research Projects on Systems Medicine

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Simula Research Laboratory	Coordinator	Norway
2	University Medical Center Hamburg Eppendorf	Partner	Germany
3	Inria	Partner	France