MEDIATE, Patient Friendly Medical Intervention, is a collaborative research project among 27 European partners that proposes improvements in the minimally invasive medical procedures. The project, which is part of the eXIT group (Intelligent Systems and Control Engineering) of the University of Girona, has won the Eureka Innovation Award 2018 for the proposed innovations in the field of minimally invasive intervention. The project proposes improvements in three areas: the medical image for the intervention (recording of images of different modalities, support for navigation and guiding, compensation of movements, etc.), improvements in intervention tools (surgical, tweezers, etc.) and tools to support decision-making during the intervention.

Several members of the eXiT group (http://exit.udg.edu), Joaquim Meléndez, Francisco Gamero, Andrés El-Fakdi and Roberto Petite, were part of the project team and developed a tool Support for TAVI interventions (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation). This type of intervention is appropriate in patients with severe aortic stenosis that cannot be operated on with the usual procedure (open heart) due to their surgical risk. The tool developed by the eXiT group consists of a software, based on an artificial intelligence technique known as case-based reasoning (RBC), which allows to recover previous interventions (cases), based on similar parameters and to reuse the information to better plan the new intervention.

MEDIATE was led by Philips Healthcare and financed (Spanish consortiums) by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism (ref TSI-020400-2010-84). The Eureka Innovation Award is a reward for EUREKA projects that have significantly advanced in the development of a new product, service or innovative process. The first prize for each category reaches €6,000 and the possibility of presenting the project during the “EUREKA Innovation Event” from May 22^nd to 24^th in Helsinki.