Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology
The Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) was established in 2008, and is a leading Comprehensive Cancer Centre dedicated to translational cancer research and cancer care.
Located within the Vall d´Hebron University Hospital Campus (Barcelona, Spain), VHIO’s researchers closely collaborate with Vall d´Hebron physician-scientists. Translational science and clinical research are therefore tightly connected which promotes superb interaction and teamwork which, in turn, accelerates the bench-bedside-bed cycle of knowledge. The research at VHIO is conducted in 3 scientific programs, 22 research groups and 3 support facilities.
VHIO´s pioneering model and programmes, coupled with its belief in combining strengths through cross-border collaborations, continue to spur advances in reversing cancer resistance, halting metastatic spread, and more effectively treating even the most undruggable tumour types.
Role in the project
The Radiomics Group (led by Raquel Perez-Lopez) is focused on applying imaging biomarkers and radiomics to cancer discovery and advancing precision imaging in personalized medicine to ultimately improve outcomes for cancer patients. The Radiomics Group will participate in the multi-centre swarm learning platform implementation (WP1). Accounting for the wide experience of VHIO’s Radiomics and Breast Cancer Groups in multi-centric studies and their participation in other European consortiums, both groups will collaborate in the development of a swarm learning model for improving breast cancer MRI screening (WP2). Moreover, dedicated groups from VHIO will provide support for accomplishing all the logistical and ethical local requirements and providing feed-back and technical support in the front-end-software development (WPs 3 and 4). VHIO is a comprehensive cancer centre with multidisciplinary teams dedicated the research and treatment of all solid tumour types; this represents the ideal scenario for the application of the tools developed in this project beyond breast cancer screening (WP6). The VHIO Communications Department will oversee the scientific communication and diffusion plan to be appropriately balanced to reach a multidisciplinary audience and will actively participate in the activities proposed within the consortium (WP7).
Raquel Perez-Lopez
Dr Raquel Perez-Lopez is an experienced academic radiologist trained at Bellvitge University Hospital in Barcelona (Spain) and the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute of Cancer Research in London (UK). Her PhD studies enabled her to identify the value of whole-body diffusion-weighted MRI as a prognostic and response biomarker of bone metastases in prostate cancer, that in turn led to the completion of the first prospective clinical trial in this context. Raquel joined VHIO in late 2017 as Team Leader of the VHIO’s newly established Radiomics Group. The group’s efforts center on advancing precision imaging in personalized medicine, towards ultimately improving outcomes for cancer patients by applying mathematical methods to image processing and artificial intelligence in the biomedical field. The Radiomics Group recent work has resulted in several manuscripts in prestigious titles including Nature Medicine, Clinical Cancer Research and Radiology. Dr. Perez-Lopez is co-investigator of several international research consortia funded by the European Commission and an active member of the Cancer Core Europe-Imaging Task Force.
Adrià Marcos
Adrià Marcos started studying Physics Engineering in 2016 in the Polytechnical University of Catalonia. One year later he joined the UPC-CFIS double engineering program to complete his studies with the Data Science and Engineering degree.
During his studies he collaborated in the DigiPatICS project, a Catalan project aiming to develop and deploy Deep Learning algorithms for cancer diagnosis assistance, and spent one year visiting New York University, working on his thesis on Unsupervised Image Denoising for electron microscope images for catalytical reactions analysis at atomic scale.
After graduating in 2022 he joined the Radiomics group at VHIO to work on the adaptation and implementation of Federated Learning methods for collaborative training of Machine Learning algorithms in the field of Cancer diagnosis and treatment optimization at European scale.
Camilo Monreal
Camilo Monreal is a Computer Scientist who was professor in the Department of Programming and Software Engineering Department at the School of Mathematics and Computer Science in the University of Habana with a master degree in Logic and AI.
He joined the Radiomics group at VHIO in 2021. One of his main roles in the group is to provide support in the group’s computational cluster while enabling the development and implementation of final end-user applications.