The EUCAIM consortium and the European Commission are excited to announce the first public release of its platform, Cancer Image Europe, marking a major milestone in the project’s development and an exciting step towards achieving its vision and goals. The first platform release brings benefits to researchers, clinicians and AI innovators across Europe and paves the way for the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Key features and highlights of EUCAIM's first platform release include a public catalogue of cancer imaging datasets from the repositories of the EU-funded AI for Health Imaging projects, following a common metadata schema, besides a federated searching tool to understand the information available in the federated providers. Moreover, full integration with the Life Science Login Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure and reusing and adding value to key components of EU-funded research projects and infrastructure in the field of cancer are also present.
Commenting on this milestone achievement, Ignacio Blanquer, leading the EUCAIM infrastructure development, says “this early prototype of EUCAIM is a proof of concept for the federation model pursued in EUCAIM. It will be the basis for a fully fledged infrastructure for sharing, reusing and exploiting cancer imaging data, especially using AI techniques.”
Prof. Luis Martí-Bonmatí, Scientific Coordinator of EUCAIM, adds that “this is the first step towards the set-up of the largest known-to-date cancer imaging infrastructure in Europe. Over the next months, the EUCAIM project will continue to extend the functionalities of the platform, linking to other research repositories, screening programmes and data warehouses towards its next upgrade, expected to be released in June 2024”.
Ricard Martínez Martínez, professor of Constitutional Law at the Universitat de València and Director of the Chair of Privacy and Digital Transformation, co-directs the work package on ethics and data protection focusing his efforts on this second aspect. This matter, where anonymization is an important factor, is critical for the guarantee of fundamental rights in EUCAIM and the design of a secure and trustworthy ecosystem for researchers, healthcare institutions, patients and society. On the other hand, the UV will lead one of the first European experiences in "data altruism" aimed at studying how to promote data donation programs for research.
Likewise, professor Francisco Soriano, a member of the IRTIC of the UV, will provide and audit the security requirements to meet the privacy needs of the project, which will include elements related to confidentiality, integrity and traceability of information and use of this private information.
By releasing the first version of Cancer Image Europe, sharing of cancer images and supporting clinical data is facilitated and collaboration between researchers, clinicians and AI innovators across Europe is stimulated. The platform aims to accelerate the pace of AI development and other data-intensive cancer research activities, thereby enabling and empowering scientific breakthroughs that will shape the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment. The project’s goals and vision contribute to the strategic objectives of the European Union's initiatives and foster innovation and research.
With the Cancer Image Europe infrastructure, the EUCAIM project addresses the fragmentation of existing cancer image repositories. A distributed Atlas of Cancer Imaging with over 60 million anonymised cancer image data from over 100,000 patients will be established as part of future updates, and the infrastructure will be fully in alignment with the European Health Data Space. The data will be accessible to clinicians, researchers and innovators across the EU for the development and benchmarking of trustworthy AI tools.
The EUCAIM project is a cornerstone of the European Commission-initiated European Cancer Imaging Initiative, a flagship of the Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, which aims to foster innovation and deployment of digital technologies in cancer treatment and care, to achieve more precise and faster clinical decision-making, diagnostics, treatments and predictive medicine for cancer patients.
For more information about the first release of the Cancer Image Europe platform and the EUCAIM project, please visit cancerimage.eu.
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.
EUCAIM is an Action supported by the Generalitat Valenciana through the Conselleria of Innovation, Industry, Trade and Tourism.
