Radiology leads flagship of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan – Kick-off for federated European infrastructure for cancer images
The EUCAIM consortium and the European Commission are excited to announce the official launch of the European Federation for Cancer Images (EUCAIM), a ground-breaking federated infrastructure deployment project aiming to power up imaging and AI towards precision medicine for Europe’s cancer patients and citizens. It is the first-of-its-kind European ‘pan-cancer’ project aiming to create an easy-access to cancer images for clinicians, researchers and innovators to streamline cancer diagnosis, treatment and care to achieve more precise and faster clinical decision making, diagnostics, treatment and predictive medicine for cancer patients.
EUCAIM will address the fragmentation of existing cancer image repositories and establish a distributed Atlas of Cancer Imaging with over 60 million anonymised cancer image data from over 100,000 patients, accessible to clinicians, researchers and innovators across the EU for the development and benchmarking of trustworthy AI tools. The infrastructure will be further populated by observational studies from hospitals (21 clinical sites in 12 EU countries), include clinical images and link with pathology, molecular and laboratory data and will be expanded to at least 30 distributed data providers from 15 countries by the end of the 4-year project. Federated AI solutions will be trained at the hospital data warehouses, keeping data privacy.
The project builds upon the results of the work of the “AI for Health Imaging” (AI4HI) Network which consists of 5 large EU-funded projects on big data and Artificial Intelligence in cancer imaging: Chaimeleon, EuCanImage, ProCancer-I, Incisive and Primage.
EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages (EUCAIM) is the cornerstone of the European Commission-initiated European Cancer Imaging Initiative, a flagship of the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP). A ground-breaking federated infrastructure deployment project aiming to power up imaging and AI towards precision medicine for Europe’s cancer patients and citizens. The project kicked off in Brussels this week.
It is scientifically led by Prof. Luis Martí-Bonmatí, Director of the Medical Imaging Department, Chairman of Radiology, La Fe University and Polytechnic Hospital (Valencia, Spain) and coordinated by the European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research (EIBIR), established by and headquartered at the European Society of Radiology in Vienna, Austria.
EUCAIM brings together 76 partners from 14 EU member states, covering competences in cancer imaging and care, big data in medical imaging, FAIR data management, ethical and legal aspects of medical data, development and deployment of research infrastructures, AI and machine learning, as well as dissemination, communication and stakeholder outreach in biomedical imaging.
In line with the European data strategy and supporting the goals of the European Health Data Space, the EUCAIM will partner with the AI Testing and Experimentation Facility for Health under the Digital Europe Programme, allowing SMEs to access its infrastructure, and rollout will be supported by the services of the European Digital Innovation Hubs.
EUCAIM follows an inclusive, collaborative approach and will interact with a plethora of stakeholders to ensure uptake at political level in member states and wide use of the infrastructure by clinicians, researchers and innovators. Clinical data providers will be invited to join the initiative through an open call procedure during the course of the project.
FORTH joins the EUCAIM initiative with two groups. The Computational Medicine Laboratory (CBML) of the Institute of Computer Science, Coordinator also of the ProCAncer-I project and the Unit of Medical Technology and Intelligent Information Systems (Medlab) of the BioMedical Research Institute.
Both laboratries have established a tradition of internationally acknowledged excellence in conducting high‐level R&D work and in developing innovative computer methods and tools in the area of medical and biomedical engineering and informatics, e‐health, m‐Health, and medical imaging.
More information on EUCAIM at https://www.eibir.org/projects/eucaim/
European Commission Factsheet European Cancer Imaging Initiative and EUCAIM: https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/92245
European Commission Press Release on launch event of European Cancer Imaging Initiative, 23 January 2022: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_286
Contact for enquiries
Prof. Manolis Tsiknakis, tsiknaki@ics.forth.gr
Computational Medicine Laboratory (CBML) of the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH
+30 6945550534
Prof Dimitrios Fotiadis, dimitris.fotiadis30@gmail.com
Unit of Medical Technology and Intelligent Information Systems (Medlab) of the BioMedical Research Institute of FORTH
+30 6979111411