Delft Health Initiative (DHI) grant for Qian Tao
The Delft Health Initiative (DHI) brings researchers together who are involved in health research and innovation, in order to focus TU Delft expertise and to contribute to pioneering health technologies within relevant (inter)national research programs. DHI has rewarded Qian Tao with a grant of € 20.000 euro for her submission: 'Not Created Equal: Visualizing Gender Differences in Population-based Screening Trial on Cardiovascular Disease (ROBINSCA)'. Her project has been judged best in the category CardioTech.
Below an introduction of the project:
Not Created Equal: Visualizing Gender Differences in Population-based Screening Trial on Cardiovascular Diseases
There have been accumulating evidences on the underlying differences between men and women in many aspects: physiological, pathological, behavioural, genetic, etc. Ignoring gender differences in clinical studies may compromise quality of research and validity of outcome. Gender differences are also present in cardiovascular diseases (CVD). ROBINSCA (Risk Or Benefit IN Screening for CArdiovascular disease) is the first large-scale population-based randomized-controlled trial for early detection (screening) and treatment of CVD-risk, involving 43,446 asymptomatic participants in the Netherlands. Suboptimal screening has a direct impact on programmes’ balance between benefits and harms. To look into the potential impact of gender on screening strategies, this project aims to investigate modern machine learning methods that can visualize the huge set of screening data in ROBINSCA, looking into difference in genders in terms of screening strategies. This project potentially contributes to future development of personalized, gender-specific screening and treatment strategies to reduce the burden of CVD for the general population.
This project will be in collaboration with Dr. Carlijn van der Aalst from Department of Public Health, Erasmus Medical Center
