Technologies for the health, sea, industry, energy and media areas will be presented in Porto
27th June 2019
The three INESC TEC's integrated R&D projects - CORAL, TEC4GROWTH and NANOSTIMA - aimed for the multidisciplinary scientific research in order to explore several knowledge fields, thus creating broad spectrum transversal technologies.
Technologies for the analysis of cells and nanometric subcellular structures, CO2 sensors, tools to assist in ocean circulation, artificial intelligence and computer vision tools for multimedia content annotations, augmented reality technologies, electric vehicle charging technologies or tools for assisting radiologists in breast reconstruction will be some of the technologies that will be on exhibition tomorrow.
“These projects were a real challenge in terms of the exploration of different areas of expertise. For example, one of the technologies that we will be presenting tomorrow has application in the fashion industry. "The technology is known as Fashion.Finder and we’ve developed tools using artificial intelligence, computer vision and crowdsourcing techniques in order to identify fashion elements and accessories in audiovisual contents such as photographies and videos of photography campaigns, fashion shows, etc." , explains Paula Viana, an INESC TEC researcher who is responsible for the FourEyes line of the TEC4GROWTH project and Professor at the School of Engineering of Porto (ISEP). But Fashion.Finder is not only applied to the fashion industry. The technology can also be adaptable to areas such as photojournalism, news or events contents, allowing the identification of personalities in archive material that can be reused, thus optimising the entire process of creating new audiovisual materials in short times, as it is usually required in a journalistic environment.
Several technologies will be presented tomorrow in the health area. Developed within the framework of the NANOSTIMA project, Intelligent Lab on Fiber (iLoF) aimed at developing a method capable of turning an optical fibre into a biosensor, using signal processing and artificial intelligence techniques in order to explore key parameters from the interaction of cells and subcellular structures with a laser light and, through these patterns, to obtain diagnostic and prognostic information.
"ILoF, which already has a registered and a pending patent, can contribute in the future to the development of the Personalised Medicine concept, particularly in the cancer and neurodegenerative diseases areas, thus contributing to the achievement of specific "biological signatures” of each disease in biological fluids (for example, blood plasma) in a simple, fast, non-invasive and low-cost way. Having access to this database of "optical fingerprints" from the several biomarkers (cells, nanovesicles), several studies may end up being conducted, including predicting the prognosis of a particular disease or defining subtypes of diseases within a more general type”, mentions João Paulo Cunha, Coordinator of INESC TEC’s Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research and Professor at FEUP.
Another technology, which will be presented tomorrow, was developed in collaboration with the Champalimaud Foundation. It already has a patent application submitted, aiming at assisting radiologists in the detection and characterisation of the inferior epigastric perforating vessels that are relevant in the planning of breast reconstruction surgeries.
Ricardo Araújo, a researcher of INESC TEC, explains that "the results achieved show that it is possible to automate a large part of a very lengthy process for the radiology team, without compromising the precision of the reports produced. In addition, the use of these algorithms allows to obtain more objective results, thus culminating in a more reproducible process of characterisation of the vascular networks. We believe that this will free up a significant portion of the time that is spent by radiologists to do other tasks that need to be performed, and will reduce the number of times that characterisation is inaccurate (due to subjectivity, for example) and will lead to the need to reformulate the plan for tissue removal during surgery”.
Before going to the technological exhibition in order to see and to test the technologies available, José Manuel Mendonça, Chairman of INESC TEC’s Board and Professor at FEUP, and Fernando Freire de Sousa, President of CCDR-Norte, will be responsible for formally closing the session of the integrated projects at 4:00 p.m.
The projects "TEC4Growth - Pervasive Intelligence, Enhancers and Proofs of Concept with Industrial Impact/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000020", “NanoSTIMA- Macro-to-Nano Human Sensing: Towards Integrated Multimodal Health Monitoring and Analytics/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000016” and “CORAL- Sustainable Ocean Exploitation: Tools and Sensors/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000036” are funded by the Northern Regional Operational Programme (Norte 2020) through Portugal 2020 and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER).
More information on the integrated projects:
- http://tec4growth.inesctec.pt/
- http://nanostima.inesctec.pt/
For more information:
Joana Coelho
Communication Service
INESC TEC
FEUP’s Campus
Rua Dr Roberto Frias
4200-465 Porto
Portugal
Tel.: +351 22 209 4297
Mob.: +351 924 4 44 321