Members of IRTIC's Computer Security, Data Protection and Privacy research line attended the European Cancer Initiative event on the 7th, a meeting included in the activities of the European Federation for Cancer Images (EUCAIM) project that brought together its partners in the Belgian capital, Brussels. On the 8th, they also participated in the 40th symposium of the Belgian Hospital Physicist Association (BHPA) in the Belgian city of Louvain-la-Neuve, where Professor Ricard Martínez gave a talk entitled ‘Protect the individual patient or improve the well-being of the population: must we choose’, which was also related to the EUCAIM initiative.
EUCAIM aims to power up imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) towards precision medicine for Europe’s cancer patients and citizens that brings together 76 partners from 14 EU member states, among which University of Valencia provides support regarding Data Privacy. The project will address the fragmentation of existing cancer image repositories and establish a distributed Atlas of Cancer Imaging with over 60 million anonymized 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 meeting with the European Cancer Initiative highlighted the role of the Cancer Image Europe platform, which includes EUCAIM, the improvement in data management and quality, as well as access to multidisciplinary communities and regulatory guidelines and the boost in the validation of AI tools.
It also highlighted the ease of access to data, tools and documentation of the project and the recognition of contributions to the development of artificial intelligence tools. Regarding the BHPA symposium, Professor Ricard Martínez highlighted the challenge of making the European Health Data Space feasible.
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 members of the consortium cover competences in cancer imaging and care, big data in medical imaging, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) 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.
EUCAIM is co-funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement umber 1011100633. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
