Biomedical image processing in the heart failure: diagnostic resources and foundational aspects

This technical report details the activity carried out within the European Project HEARTFAID, a knowledge based platform of services for supporting medical-clinical management of the heart failure within the elderly population. More in detail, HEARTFAID aims at defining efficient and effective health care delivery organization and management models for an optimal patients management in the field of cardiovascular diseases. An informative and decision support platform of services will be devised for improving all the processes related to diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and personalization of health care of the Heart Failure (HF) in elderly population. To this end, innovative results on computational modelling, knowledge discovery methodologies, visualization and imaging techniques, and the medical knowledge of the relevant domain will be opportunely integrated to design and develop an effective and reliable Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS): the HEARTFAID CDSS, corresponding to the core of HEARTFAID intelligence. This system will be able to process clinical knowledge and patient-related information, intelligently filtered, processed and presented at appropriate times, to enhance patient care. It will be devised as a service of the HEARTFAID platform for providing an effective support to the daily practice of the clinicians, by implementing adequate data processing algorithms, by providing guidelines to medical protocols as well as access to the knowledge base, by sending alarms in case of critical situations, and by supplying diagnostic suggestions. The main focus of this report is on a peculiar issue involved in the development of the HEARTFAID CDSS for supporting medical decision making, namely the development of innovative approaches for biomedical image processing. This report is ideally divided into two parts: in the first part (Chapter 2) the discussion consists of a revision of the State of the Art; whereas in the second part (Chapter 3) the attention is focused on the HEARTFAID specificity.