OR17
Democratizing education and research for new generation of medical professionals: TB Portals data and resources
A Rosenthal()
The TB Portals program (TBPP) is a crucial educational resource for a new generation of medical professionals, beginning their careers in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) transforms big data into clinical insights, and genomic information enables the prescription of drugs tailored specifically for each patient and pathogen.
TBPP maintains a large patient-centric database, currently comprising 14,000 anonymized records that include socioeconomic, microbiological, genomic, radiological, and clinical treatment data for each patient. This information originates from 19 countries burdened heavily by drug-resistant tuberculosis. In many of these countries, TB remains a disease of the impoverished, making the optimization of treatment and specialized education for doctors and radiologists vitally important.
TB Portals facilitates the sequencing of clinical samples followed by comprehensive bioinformatics analysis of the complete genomic data. For X-rays and CT scans within TB Portals, it is possible to evaluate both manual annotations by professional radiologists and AI predictions. Unique three-dimensional models of lungs, constructed from the CT scans of TBPP patients and enriched with actual clinical data, illustrate the progression of the disease and the effects of treatments.
Thousands of TBPP clinical cases, categorized by drug resistance types, case definitions, comorbidities, treatment outcomes, and radiological findings, are prepared for integration into medical education. They offer a depth and breadth of information unavailable in textbooks and general resources. TB Portals' resources are accessible to students, doctors, and researchers worldwide, democratizing access to TB information, advancing global health equity, and encouraging international collaboration to eradicate tuberculosis.