EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages

Start date: 1 January 2023   End date: 31 December 2026

 Website: https://cancerimage.eu/

At the beginning of 2023, the European Commission launched 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.

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), and will be expanded to at least 30 distributed data providers from 15 countries by the end of its 4-year lifetime. Federated AI solutions will be trained at the hospital data warehouses, guaranteeing data privacy.

EUCAIM is the cornerstone of the European Commission initiated European Cancer Imaging Initiative, a flagship of the Europe's Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP), 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. It is scientifically led by Prof. Luis Martí-Bonmatí, Chairman of Radiology, La Fe University and Polytechnic Hospital (Valencia, Spain) and coordinated by the European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research (EIBIR) in Vienna, Austria.

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.

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

In line with the European data strategy and supporting the goals of the European Health Data Space, EUCAIM will partner with the AI Testing and Experimentation Facility for Health under the Digital Europe Programme.

EUCAIM follows an inclusive, collaborative approach and will interact with a plethora of stakeholders to ensure uptake at the 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.

CNR contributes to EUCAIM with two research institutes: the Institute of Biostructures and BioImages (IBB-CNR) based in Naples and Turin and the Institute of Information Science and Technologies “Alessandro Faedo” (ISTI-CNR) based in Pisa. IBB-CNR participates as a core partner of Euro BioImaging, a European research infrastructure consortium, and will be leading the activities on “Business & Sustainability models” and also contributing to several tasks related to the central hub implementation and use cases. ISTI-CNR is contributing as a partner of the ProCAncer-I project and is contributing to activities on the data federation & interoperability framework, by collaborating to the definition of an hyper-ontology and a common data model, leveraging MOLGENIS and OMOP. Moreover, ISTI-CNR is contributing to shaping the use cases for EUCAIM data and infrastructure, by defining user roles and user stories.  Finally the experience matured in ProCAncer-I and the AI4HI initiative, with respect to AI model development and validation [1] is being spent to structure standardised processing pipelines for AI-based image processing.

More information can be found at EUCAIM website (https://cancerimage.eu/).

Contact for enquiries

ISTI-CNR Sara Colantonio, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., +39 050 6213141