gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Brain infections are still a life threatening event in immunocompromised patients. Due to delays in etiological diagnosis, severe complications and related mortality rate are still too high. Brain Supporters is a multidisciplinary team working to develop a software tool which would be helpful for physicians trying to minimize this event in an innovative way.

Material and methods: All biological and clinical data we have selected, related to immunosuppressed patients with suspected or proven brain infectious diseases, and radiologic images (MR or CT) of their brain, will be collected in an international database freely accessible to transplant centres world-wide through a secure web site: www.brainsupporters.eu. Every case will be subject to a blind evaluation by two teams of specialists in radiologic and microbiology, in accordance with guidelines we have defined starting from an international criterion for proven diagnosis and then classified by aetiological agent.

Aim of the project: We aim to obtain the probability of presence for any pathological agent, starting from the most spread, analysing the "radiologic footprint" of lesions and clinical and biological data of the subject to eventually minimize the variability due to the different characteristics of the host, his immunosuppressant therapies and clinical condition.

We have designed and implemented the database and chosen a dicom software with an html5 interface to manage radiologic images directly from the web site, even from a tablet and without installing other tools. We are developing and testing a software package we will use for data and image analysis.

Conclusions: The development of a software as a diagnostic supportive tool for physicians could lead to an early diagnosis, gain of time and greater management of brain infectious diseases in immunocompromised patients. A little step to ameliorate their condition.