Next Level Digital Histopathology
Chemometric Histopathology via Coherent Raman Imaging for Precision Medicine
CHARM is one of the first ever EIC Transition Challenges projects, funded by the EU to support moving technologies from laboratories into the real world.
In the framework of the “Medical Technology and Devices: from Lab to Patient” Challenge from 2022, CHARM aims to develop a medical device based on high-speed, low-cost Raman digital imaging technology and artificial intelligence to transform cancer diagnosis and treatment.
A novel technology for tissue analysis
Unstained samples
Our Raman imaging technology analyses tissue samples with light, without the need for labelling or chemical staining.
More than images
Within minutes, our method extracts rich morphological and biomolecular data from the biopsy, including the molecular composition.
AI-supported diagnosis
AI-based methods elaborate the data from patient tissues to identify cancerous cells and support pathologists in the diagnosis.
Saving pathologists' time
CHARM addresses two limitations of digital pathology:
- the need for tissue staining, which is time consuming and introduces variability between samples;
- the inability to measure the tissue molecular composition, which can be crucial to determine tumor subtypes and grade.
Our approach reduce the pathologist’s workload by avoiding the staining and by including a prescreening performed by the AI agent.
The pathologist is provided with a decision tree (allowing interpretability) and a diagnostic report that support the differentiation between normal and tumor tissue and includes suggestions for cancer type and grade classification.
Case study: head & neck cancer
During CHARM, we will prove the feasibility of CRS microscopy for diagnosis on a representative case: the Head and Neck Cancer.
When diagnosed early, head and neck cancers can be treated more easily and the chances of survival increase tremendously. However, currently 2 in 3 of all head and neck cancer patients are diagnosed at advanced stage.
Head and Neck cancer can be use as model for a larger variety of cancers characterised by field cancerization: esophageal, gastrointestinal, non-melanoma skin, non-small cell lung, and most of breast cancers.
CHARM Consortium
