Clinical Research Directory

LLM-Generated Plain-Language Patient Synopses to Improve Comprehension in Hematology and Oncology (oncOPAL)

This study tests whether patients with blood cancer or other cancers better understand their medical information when it is rewritten in plain language by an artificial intelligence (AI) system. When patients are discharged from the hospital, they receive a medical letter summarizing their diagnosis, treatment, and next steps. These letters are often written in technical language that is difficult for patients to understand. In this study, an AI language model running on the hospital's own secure servers rewrites parts of this letter into simpler language. A physician checks the simplified version before the patient receives it. Patients are randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group receives both the standard medical letter and the AI-simplified version. The other group receives the standard letter only. A separate group of patients who do not speak German well will receive a simplified and translated version. After reading their letter, all participants fill out a short questionnaire about how well they understood the information. The study takes place at TUM University Hospital (Klinikum rechts der Isar) in Munich, Germany.

Advanced Imaging Holistic Omics Biobank

Imaging methods today represent the pillar of prevention, diagnosis, patients monitoring and treatment. Improvement in technology led the development of increasingly high-performance scanners whose potential has not yet been fully explored. In particular, recently introduced photon counting CT scanner and new high filed MRI offers a lake of latent information derived from the images (e.g. spectral data from CT) of potentially great interest and potentially able to provide new insight but that are currently mostly unexplored .These features are also called "opportunist features" because they are in each exam and can be freely derived from images without changing the study protocol used for clinical practice examination but extracted a posteriori from the images representing a precious source of deep characterization of the patients, equally or even more than a genomic analysis, with possible high relevance in the field of screening and prevention, being able to contribute to defining signatures indicating a particular risk of remotely developing a specific pathological condition. The prospective collection of clinical and imaging data from subjects undergoing diagnostic tests with advanced technology has the potential to increase knowledge of the pathophysiological mechanisms of different pathological conditions, to explore and validate the diagnostic-predictive value of opportunistic features not currently used in practice clinical, to increase the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy of CT and MRI examinations and to provide a unique pool for scientific research. Previous relevant experience was conducted in the United Kingdom (UK biobank) where data from over 500,000 patients have been collected in the last 10 years, providing an enormous pool for spontaneous and funded scientific research. This project (UK biobank), although of enormous scientific value, is currently obsolete in terms of the imaging technology used.

Multicenter Validation Trial of [18F]AlF-FAPI-74 for PET Imaging of Cancer-associated Fibroblasts Through Fibroblast Activation Protein Inhibitors (FAPI) in Different Tumor Types

The aim of the project is to demonstrate superior detection ratio of \[18F\]AlF-FAPI-74 PET/CT compared to \[18F\]FDG PET/CT or conventional imaging in treatment-naïve, newly diagnosed patients with oesophagogastric adenocarcinoma (clinical T1-4N0-3M0) and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (clinical T1-4N0-2M0-1) and describe the clinical utility of \[18F\]AlF-FAPI-74 PET/CT in oncological patients with a clinically challenging situation.

Efficacy of Esmolol in the Identification of Cardiovascular Disorders by Cirrhosis, Diabetes Mellitus and Cardiotoxic Treatments

The purpose of this study is to assess the superiority of esmolol echocardiography over conventional echocardiography in the diagnosis of subclinical myocardial involvement associated with diabetes mellitus 2, cirrhosis and antineoplastic treatments.