The EUCAIM Consortium and the European Commission recently announced the official launch of the EUropean federation for CAncer IMage (EUCAIM), a groundbreaking federated infrastructure deployment project, aimed at propelling cancer imaging and towards precision medicine for cancer patients and citizens of Member States.
On January 23, the European Commission launched “ the European Cancer Imaging Initiative » with two projects, EUCAIM and that of a AI for Health Testing and Experimentation Center (TEF-Health).
EUCAIM is one of the flagship projects of the European plan to fight once morest cancer (EBCP), one of the objectives of which is to make the most of the potential of data and digital technologies such as AI or high-performance computing. performance (HPC) to fight cancer.
A cornerstone of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative, funded under the Digital Europe DIGITAL program (€18 million co-funded by the EU), EUCAIM aims to develop a federated European infrastructure for cancer data. pictures of cancer. The project starts with 21 clinical sites in 12 countries but should bring together a minimum of 30 distributed data providers from 15 countries by its end, ie in 4 years.
Take advantage of imagery data
There are cancer imaging datasets for different types of cancer, but these are scattered among many repositories and clinical centers in Europe, and not easily accessible to clinicians, researchers and innovators.
EUCAIM will address the fragmentation of existing cancer image repositories by building on the AI for Health Imaging Initiative (AI4HI) repositories, European research infrastructures and national/regional repositories, and by including clinical images, pathologies, molecular and laboratory data.
For this purpose, it brings together 76 partners from 14 EU Member States, covering skills in cancer imaging and care, big data in medical imaging, FAIR data management, ethical and legal aspects of medical data, development and the deployment of research infrastructures, AI and ML as well as the dissemination, communication and awareness of stakeholders in biomedical imaging.
This project builds on the results of the work of the AI4HI network, composed of 86 affiliated institutions from 20 countries involved in 5 major EU-funded projects on big data and AI in cancer imaging: Chaimeleon, EuCanImage, ProCancer-I, Incisive et Primage . These are developing AI algorithms to detect cancer from imagery and establishing federated repositories for cancer images.
At least 50 algorithms, AI tools and clinical prediction models for researchers within the infrastructure should be deployed by the end of the project.
Cancer imaging data will be made available to TEF-Health, allowing SMEs to access its infrastructure, and the roll-out will be supported by the services of European Digital Innovation Hubs.
The design of the pan-European digital infrastructure should be completed by December 2023 and the collaboration mechanisms put in place. Data providers will then be able to connect to this new European federated platform. The first version of the platform will be released by the end of 2024 and the final version is expected by the end of 2025.
