Brief description

DIOPTRA inspires to address the aforementioned issues by incorporating new technologies for Colorectal Cancer (CRC) risk assessment, screening and progression, while providing robust evidence-based indications of Cancers of Unknown Primary (CUP) relationships to CRC. We aim to build a stro g evidence base toward a unified holistic protocol for primary CRC screening, applicable both to undiagnosed cancer patients (via scheduled screening recommendations) and CUP patients corresponding to the CRC phenotype. Toward this goal, we will incorporate lifestyle and environmental factors and gauge the predictive power of investigated biomarkers and gene-expression profiling, seeking to unveil molecular mechanisms of CRC development and CUP incidence. In this context, we will also examine the efficacy of network modeling and AI-based DSS for early primary CRC identification, training a set of models on large volumes of primary CRC data including in-situ and metastatic carcinomas, using the latter as a knowledge base for CUP analysis.