Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has a poor prognosis with a 5-year overall survival rate of 10% and it is projected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality by 2030. The treatment is challenging due to the fact that the pancreas is a hidden organ and PDAC has an aggressive biology with early metastasis and resistance to chemotherapy. In this contest, PDAC represents both a social and economic burden for the national healthcare system. Improving diagnostic accuracy and enforcing personalizing medicine is required to improve chemotherapy and surgical success.

The 360PDC project entails a prospective, multi-centric study to develop an integrated artificially intelligence-based approach of quantitative biomarkers from radiomics analysis and metabolome to investigate factors in PDAC patients associated with treatment success to chemotherapy and/or surgical resection. The resulting smart tool will provide an objective starting point to select the optimal therapeutic strategy for patients with a pancreatic adenocarcinoma, tailoring the best therapeutic pathway for each individual. If so, clinician will have at disposal a powerful instrument to choose the best approach for the patient avoiding not useful therapy or surgery, reducing the cost for the public health system and prevent the detrimental effect of an ineffective treatment for the patients.

The project is coordinated by Humanitas Research Hospital and involves ISMETT and the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, which will develop an Artificial Intelligence software for PDAC tumor segmentation and radiomics extraction, and will conduct the related Machine Learning analysis.