In Munich, there’s this place called Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital. It’s a special place and hospital for kids who have really serious and long-lasting sicknesses. They’ve been helping out kids since way back in 1846 when a doctor named Dr. August von Hauner started it all.
Nowadays, they’re not just helping out kids from Munich or Bavaria, but from all over Germany and even from different parts of the world! They don’t care where you’re from or what you look like, they just want to help you feel better.
They’re all about giving top-notch care that’s just for kids. And get this—they’re always trying to make things even better! They team up with lots of other hospitals and experts to figure out new and improved ways to treat kids’ sicknesses.
At Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital, they really get that kids are super important. They want to make sure everyone respects how kids see the world.
And guess what? They don’t just treat kids—they also learn from them! They think it’s really important for kids to be part of making medicine better. So, they listen to what kids and their families have to say, and they work together to find new ways to help.
They’re even part of this big project called the German Centre for Child and Adolescent Health, where they’re trying to make medicine more personalized and precise, just for kids!
If you’re a kid with a rare disease, the team of Dr. von Hauner Children’s hospital is here to care for you! They’re here to give you hope and try their best to help you feel better, no matter what.
SCIVIAS Study
Hey there! So, at Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital, they’re doing this thing called the SCIVIAS study. They’re checking out kids with rare diseases to see if they can find special signs that might show up before they actually get sick.
They use cool machines to take really clear pictures of the back of the kids’ eyes. This helps them see if there’s anything weird going on that could mean they might get a certain kind of sickness.
Then, they look at stuff in the kids’ blood and pee to find clues. It’s like being a detective, but for health stuff! They even have super smart computers helping them out. These computers look at all the information they gather and try to find patterns to help figure out what’s going on.
Of course, they’re super careful with all the info they collect. They make sure it’s all safe and private so nobody else can see it.
The whole point of this is to find out if they can spot these rare diseases early, so they can help kids feel better faster. Cool, right?
AMIGO
Our project “AMIGO: Advanced Medical Intelligence for Guiding Orphan Medicine” is run by Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital in Munich. They’re trying to help kids who have really rare diseases, but don’t get a lot of attention in medicine.
When a kid goes to the hospital, they ask a lot of questions and do some tests, like taking blood and pee samples, and looking at their eyes. Then, some smart people called bioinformaticians look at all this information. But even with all these tests, they only figure out what’s wrong about 30% of the time, especially for really rare diseases that mostly come from genes. And for over 95% of these rare diseases, there isn’t even a medicine that’s been tested and approved yet! This makes things really hard for the doctors and the kids and their families.
So, the AMIGO project wants to do something to help. They want to learn more from all this information. And don’t worry, they’re keeping it all safe and private while they do this. They’re using a special way to look at the data without sharing it everywhere.
By putting all this information into something called a “Clinical Knowledge Graph”, scientists and doctors from all over the world can use it to learn and help figure out diseases faster and better. This could help make treatments better and maybe even find new medicines!
And guess what? It’s not just about helping kids. The things they learn could also help grown-ups with problems like heart or brain issues. So, it’s like they’re using information to help everyone stay healthy.