Ricard Martínez, professor of the Department of Constitutional Law of the University of Valencia (UV); and Francisco Soriano, a researcher at the Institute of Robotics and Information and Communication Technologies (IRTIC) participate in the European project EUCAIM (European Cancer Imaging Initiative), which aims to deploy a European digital infrastructure of deidentified images related to cancer that can be used by medical personnel, researchers or innovators. The initial meeting of the project took place today, Tuesday, January 24.
The proposal, which involves 76 partners from 14 European Union countries, aims to build a useful system for clinical decision-making and support diagnosis, treatment and predictive medicine. The proposal will create a distributed Atlas with more than 60 million anonymised images from 100,000 patients.
In the project, the UV participates as a partner through the Institute of Robotics and Information and Communication Technologies (IRTIC). The privacy and security area will lead the tasks that guarantee the adequate regulatory compliance of the project. This task not only implies being able to align the project with the General Data Protection Regulation, but it will also be necessary to define a comparative framework based on national laws, and recently approved legislation such as the Data Governance Act, and evolve the project. with laws in the preparation phase such as the Data Act, AI Regulation, European Health Data Space Regulation.
In this sense, Ricard Martínez Martínez, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Valencia and director of the Chair of Privacy and Digital Transformation, co-directs the ethics and data protection work package and focuses his efforts on this second aspect. “Our work is decisive in ensuring the guarantee of fundamental rights in EUCAIM and the design of a safe and reliable ecosystem for researchers, health institutions, patients and society”, he highlighted.
Professor Francisco Soriano, from IRTIC and professor at the School of Engineering (ETSE-UV), will provide and audit the security requirements that make it possible to meet the privacy needs of the project, which will include elements related to confidentiality, integrity and traceability of the information and use of that private information. On the other hand, the IRTIC team will address aspects related to the anonymisation of the data as a preferred strategy for its treatment.
In addition, the University of Valencia will lead one of the first European experiences in “data altruism” aimed at studying how to promote data donation programs for research.
The project is led by Professor Luis Martí-Bonmatí, Director of the Department of Medical Imaging, Professor of Radiology, University and Polytechnic Hospital La Fe of Valencia and coordinated by the European Institute for Research in Biomedical Imaging (EIBIR), established by and with based at the European Society of Radiology in Vienna, Austria.
EUCAIM is a key part of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative initiated by the European Commission, the most important project of the European Plan to Fight Cancer (EBCP), whose objective is to promote innovation and the deployment of digital technologies in the treatment and cancer care, to achieve more accurate and faster clinical decisions.
More information about EUCAIM: https://www.eibir.org/projects/eucaim/
EUCAIM fact sheet: https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/92245
