INESC TEC AND HEALTH

As announced in this edition of BIP, INESC TEC is currently developing technological solutions to improve the efficiency of breast cancer surgery, it is important to remind our readers of the imperative relationship that our institute has with the health field.

INESC TEC is not a health institute in its classical sense – it is, however, an institute that conducts research in health care.

Health is an extremely comprehensive designation: it can refer to the medical act, hospital management, public health, medical instrumentation, genome decoding, imaging, nanorobotics, telemedicine, diagnosis – well, it can refer to almost anything we want. And today none of this is effective without technology.

For years, INESC TEC has been promoting its TEC4HEALTH initiative, with numerous projects completed successfully, and others underway. The cancer area is actually one that has received a lot of attention from various INESC TEC groups, from telecommunications to computer science, which has resulted in projects with groups in hospitals (such as São João Hospital) and national players (such as the Champalimaud Foundation), to give two examples.

Not always have the public opinion or the academic community understood this reality: that research in health can also be technological research. Therefore, the challenge facing the developed country that is Portugal is simple: how to forge, strengthen, make productive the essential multidisciplinary alliances between areas which are usually so different, such as biology, medicine or information technology, communication, electronics and similar areas where INESC TEC conducts research – moreover, we want to make this alliance even more credible by bringing in players from the business and public sectors.

A successful example of that in Porto is the connection between INEB and IBMC, now consolidated in I3S. This connection shows that this is the way to go. INESC TEC’s intervention in this equation is, therefore, very exciting.