Cross-project collaboration

17.01.2025.21.01.2025.

Celebrating the Conclusion of the RECOGNISED Project: A Milestone in Diabetes and Dementia Research

After four impactful years of collaboration, the RECOGNISED project, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, has successfully reached its conclusion. This initiative brought together 21 partners from nine countries, including academic institutions, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), patient advocacy groups, and international research infrastructures like EATRIS, showcasing the power of multidisciplinary collaboration. Learn more about RECOGNISED project at [link]

Collaborating institutions in RECOGNISED project

Key Achievements:

🔬 Innovative Research: The project explored the use of the retina as a “window to the brain,” focusing on how retinal changes can serve as biomarkers for cognitive decline and dementia in individuals with type 2 diabetes.

💡 Groundbreaking Findings: Researchers conducted experimental and clinical studies, uncovering common molecular mechanisms between diabetic retinopathy and Alzheimer’s disease.

🌍 Global Collaboration: With partners from across Europe, including Montenegro, Spain, Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands, the project fostered a diverse network of experts in diabetes, ophthalmology, and neurology.

The insights gained through RECOGNISED have opened new avenues for early detection and treatment strategies, improving the quality of life for people with type 2 diabetes at risk of cognitive decline.

We extend our gratitude to all the partners and researchers for their dedication and to the European Union for their support through Horizon 2020.

Together, we are advancing the future of healthcare. 💙

30.12.2024.30.12.2024.

HPC/AI Workshop and Student Conference

The University of Donja Gorica hosted the highly anticipated HPC/AI Workshop and Student Conference on Saturday, December 21st. This event served as a key platform to highlight the outcomes of the HPC4S3ME IPA project and the AIFusion training program supported by the Innovation Fund of Montenegro. Both projects were developed within the framework of EuroCC2/EuroCC4SEE, with support from the NCC Montenegro team. The events showcased significant advancements in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) in Montenegro.

AI-AGE team members took part in mentoring students throughout the preparetion for the conference. The conference resulted in a Book of abstracts published on 30 December 2024. Read more at: link.

HPC/AI Workshop and Student Conference took place on 21 December 2024 at the UDG

Over 50 attendees at the conference, mainly students and young researchers

01.11.2024.21.01.2025.

Advancing Medical Research with UK Biobank and Retinal Biomarkers

The UK Biobank is a world-renowned resource, housing comprehensive health and genetic data from over 500,000 participants. This invaluable platform is revolutionizing medical research by providing researchers access to detailed medical, lifestyle, and imaging data, driving breakthroughs in understanding and treating diseases like cancer, dementia, and other chronic illnesses.

🌟 Key Project Highlight:
One of the pivotal research initiatives, “Exploring the Link Between Dementia and Cancer: Retinal Biomarkers as Predictors of Colon Cancer and Dementia”, is uncovering how retinal biomarkers can serve as early predictors for both colorectal carcinoma and Alzheimer’s disease. By analyzing microvascular complexity in retinal fundus images, this project seeks to identify patterns that could enhance early diagnosis and patient care. Learn more at [link]

✨ Inspired by the RECOGNISED Project:
This initiative builds on insights from the EU-funded RECOGNISED project, which explores the connection between retinal health, cognitive dysfunction, and the risk of dementia in individuals with type 2 diabetes. RECOGNISED has demonstrated the immense potential of retinal imaging as a tool to understand and address chronic diseases. More on RECOGNISED project at [link]

Together, these projects exemplify how innovative approaches and global collaboration can transform healthcare by addressing pressing challenges and improving early detection strategies.

💡 Retinal biomarkers are unlocking new possibilities in personalized medicine and preventive care—advancing our fight against complex diseases.

11.10.2024.11.10.2024.

In-house HPC infrastructure update

As planned, our project AI-AGE is advancing high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to support AI-driven research on biomarkers of aging in medical applications. This initiative will empower our team with cutting-edge resources, allowing us to enhance our capacity for data analysis and predictive modeling. To meet the demands of sophisticated AI computations, with the support of AI-AGE, we are upgrading our existing HPC setup with a powerful computing node. This new addition includes a rack computing node equipped with a 48 CPU cores with 128GB RAM, NVIDIA L40 48GB GPUs, and 2x480GB internal SSDs. In addition, the project supported NAS storage of 24TB (multiple disks with RAID) dedicated for dataset management. This infrastructure enhancement is designed to integrate smoothly with our existing equipment, augmenting both our computational and storage capabilities while providing significant value for our investment.

New computing infrastructure supported by the AI-AGE project as planned

AI-AGE project, supported by the Ministry of education, science and innovation, is implemendet through collaboration between Faculty for information systems and technologies at Uiversity of Donja Gorica, and Faculty of medicine at University of Montenegro. The in-house HPC infrastructure is a result of cross-project collaboration with HPC4S3ME project (IPA programme) and both of these project are done with the support from EUROCC NCC Montenegro. The main goal for the in-house lab is for researchers to gain a hands on experience with physical equipment a their disposal, while for larger computing tasks, we will apply for computing time on some of the EU supercomputers.