(October 1, 2017) - Researches officially started the clock today on the CAD WALK project. The goal of the EU-funded project is to provide a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for foot problems within a two year time frame. Led by Dr. Brian Booth at the University of Antwerp, the project also includes clinical researchers at Sint Maartenskliniek (Nijmegen, NL) as well as rs scan (Paal, BE), a world leader in plantar pressure measurement devices.
While today marks the official start of the project, preparations for CAD WALK began as early as two months ago. Dr. Booth met with project partners August 25th to kick off the project and to establish a coordinated development plan. Since then, work has begun on the intellectual property management within the project, developing CAD WALK's social media strategy, and preparing the project's ethics approval application. As the project starts, these tasks remain the focus as they lay the groundwork for future data collection and research.
"The ethics approval and intellectual property management are clearly important to sort out right from the start", says Booth. "Those two tasks set up how we are going to handle all the data we will create during this project, from protecting the personal information of our test subjects to clarifying who owns what parts of the research. It is equally important for our funding agency, [the European Commission], as they perform their own reviews of these agreements." The European Commission's deadline for the ethics approval is the end December, 2017 while the intellectual property agreement is expected to be completed by November, 2018.
