Insights on the Development of PRACTICE, a Research-oriented Healthcare Platform

This paper describes the development of PRACTICE, a distributed healthcare technological platform that supports various research initiatives by the University of Milan and the Angelo Bianchi Bonomi Hemophilia and Thrombosis Center, Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda, Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico. PRACTICE includes three main components: a mobile app that patients can use to self-acquire ultrasound images at home, a computer-aided diagnosis web application that supports the practitioners through a set of machine learning models, and a set of web tools for image annotation, a prerequisite for training the machine learning models. Although PRACTICE was designed in the specific context of supporting the detection of joint recess blood effusions in hemophilic patients, this paper describes the main design and implementation challenges that apply to other applications of a research-oriented health platform.