Politecnico di Milano Joins CancerScan to Advance Precision Oncology through Digital Twins

Politecnico di Milano is playing a key role in CancerScan, a European initiative focused on enabling precision oncology through patient-specific tumour digital twins. The PoliMi team, from the NECSTLab of the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB), contributes advanced expertise in computer architecture, heterogeneous computing, and energy-efficient system design, addressing the challenge of transforming complex biomedical data into clinically actionable insights within realistic time and sustainability constraints.

The team is led by Marco Santambrogio, Full Professor of Computer Architecture and Director of NECSTLab, and includes Davide Conficconi, Assistant Professor and co-lead of the technical activities, together with Virginia Tasso, Francesco Pesce, and Leonardo De Grandis, all PhD students at NECSTLab. Santambrogio and Conficconi jointly guide the architectural vision and technical execution of PoliMi’s contribution, ensuring strong alignment between research innovation and clinical deployment.

Within CancerScan, the Politecnico di Milano team focuses on the design of heterogeneous GPU–FPGA computing infrastructures tailored to medical workloads. The project’s ambition to integrate digital pathology, parameter extraction, and tumour simulation into a unified digital twin pipeline requires processing massive datasets and running complex models under strict timing and energy constraints. Traditional CPU-centric solutions are insufficient to meet these demands at scale. By combining the high-throughput capabilities of GPUs with the low-latency and energy-efficient characteristics of FPGAs, the PoliMi team aims to deliver computing solutions that are both powerful and deployable in real hospital environments.