CARDIOCARE: An integrated platform for the management of elderly multimorbid patients with breast cancer therapy induced cardiac toxicity.

Breast cancer (BC) remains the most diagnosed cancer in women, accounting for 12% of new annual cancer cases in Europe and worldwide. Advances in surgery, radiotherapy and systemic treatment have resulted in improved clinical outcomes and increased survival rates in recent years. However, BC therapy-related cardiotoxicity, may severely impact short- and long-term quality of life and survival. This study presents the CARDIOCARE platform and its main components, which by integrating patient-specific data from different categories, data from patient-oriented eHealth applications and wearable devices, and by employing advanced data mining and machine learning approaches, provides the healthcare professionals with a valuable tool for effectively managing BC patients and preventing or alleviating treatment induced cardiotoxicity.Clinical Relevance- Through the adoption of CARDIOCARE platform healthcare professionals are able to stratify patients for their risk for cardiotoxicity and timely apply adequate interventions to prevent its onset.

The impact of spin coupling signal loss on fat content characterization in multi-echo acquisitions with different echo spacing.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to assess the effect of echo spacing in transverse magnetization (T2) signal decay of gel and fat (oil) samples. Additionally, we assess the feasibility of using spin coupling as a determinant of fat content. METHODS: Phantoms of known T2 values, as well as vegetable oil phantoms, were scanned at 1.5T scanner with a multi echo FSE sequence of variable echo spacing above and below the empirical threshold of 20ms for echo train signal modulation (6.7, 13.6, 26.8, and 40ms). T2 values were calculated from monoexponential fitting of the data. Relative signal loss between the four acquisitions of different echo spacing was calculated. RESULTS: Agreement in the T2 values of water gel phantom was observed in all acquisitions as opposed to fat phantom (oil) samples. Relative differences in signal intensity between two successive sequences of different echo spacing on composite fat/water regions of interest was found to be linearly correlated to fat fraction of the ROI. CONCLUSION: The sample specific degree of signal loss that was observed between different fat samples (vegetable oils) can be attributed to the composition of each sample in J coupled fat components. Hence, spin coupling may be used as a determinant of fat content.