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This Fellowship is aimed at early- and mid-career researchers employed at the Charité who are working on projects that add value to their own research "micro-environment" (i.e. research group, department, or clinic) and beyond.

The second cohort of the SPOKES Wellcome Trust Funded Translational Partnership Fellowship has been selected now. We would like to congratulate the Fellows on their successful applications, and wish them success in their projects.

Current Fellows and Projects

Mag. Dr. Gregor Liegl and Dr. Alizé Rogge

PROCES – Patient-Reported Outcomes Consultation for Effective Science

Assessing the patient's perspective using patient reported outcomes (PROs) has become an important part of medical practice and clinical research. However, specific knowledge is required when it comes to applying, implementing, analysing and interpreting PRO measures. Consequently, there is a growing need for qualified expert advice for both scientists and clinicians aiming to use PROs in their research or in clinical practice.

As opposed to some other countries, a standardised concept for professional PRO consulting is still missing for Germany. Thus, the aim of the PROCES project is to develop and evaluate a standardised and effective PRO consulting framework to be implemented at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Link to the website

Dr. Roxanne Lofredi

Towards computational reproducibility of motor symptom assessment in brain disorders

My name is Roxanne Lofredi and I am a neurology resident specialised in movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. Most movement disorders are considered clinical diagnoses that rely solely on expert assessments of specialists, as reliable diagnostic biomarkers are lacking. Both for diagnosis as well as treatment evaluation from clinical routine to randomised trials, symptom severity is repeatedly scored by clinical raters using internationally validated video-taped clinical examinations. This poses a significant risk for observer biases and constitutes a roadblock for transparency, independence, and reproducibility in clinical research. My research focus supported by the SPOKES fellowship is to overcome this roadblock by developing an objective and reproducible computer-vision approach to motor symptom assessment that follows open-science principles and builds the framework to share the valuable data stored by clinical centers worldwide via metadata bases.

Links:

Department of Neurology with Experimental Neurology/Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation

Website RETUNE

Twitter

Dr. Seyedamirhosein Motamedi

Implementation of a Data Management and Image Analysis Pipeline for Translational and Interdisciplinary Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography

The eye’s retina is a window to the brain: It is part of the central nervous system, yet easy to access with high-resolution imaging techniques. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a fast and non-invasive method to acquire 3D images of the retina in µm resolution. Since 2011, we apply OCT in clinical studies on multiple sclerosis (MS) and related disorders, however, the lack of a standardised data management and image analysis pipeline is greatly felt in these studies. The aim of this project is to build a comprehensive pipeline for standardised OCT data management and image analysis, to reduce the discrepancies between studies and prevent a repetition of tasks on overlapping datasets in different studies. Another aim of this project is to expand our segmentation algorithm to segment the ganglion cell layer (GCL) and inner plexiform layer (IPL), which has not been properly done by any state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms due to the image texture similarity of these two layers.

Link to the website

Fellow projects of the first cohort

  • Dr. Katarina Braune and Hanne Ballhausen: The OPEN Project
  • Dr. Felix Fischer: PROM2PRO
  • Dr. Toivo Glatz and Jessica Rohmann: PEERSPECTIVES
  • Dr. Wolf-Julian Neumann: From experiment to open metadata repository: Computational reproducibility for FAIR translational neuromodulation research in clinical neuroscience.
  • Dr. Sophie Piper: The iBikE Smart Learner

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