In short
EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages (EUCAIM) is the cornerstone of the European Commission-initiated European Cancer Imaging Initiative, a flagship of 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, treatment and predictive medicine for cancer patients. The 4-year project started in January 2023 and joins 79 partners to deploy a pan-European digital federated infrastructure of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) cancer-related, de-identified, real-world images which will allow to train and validate artificial intelligence algorithms and prediction models of outcomes.
Project description
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative is one of the flagships of the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP). One of the objectives of the Plan is to make the most of the potential of data and digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or High-Performance Computing (HPC) to combat cancer.
The Initiative showcases how medical images can be accessed, used and pooled, while ensuring a high level of ethics, trust, security and personal data protection in full compliance with EU values and rules. It makes large amounts of cancer images and linked clinical data easily accessible to European clinicians, researchers and innovators in line with the European data strategy and supporting the goals of the European Health Data Space. EUCAIM brings together clinical data providers, researchers, research infrastructures and industry with mature solutions, addressing the challenges of implementing such a cancer-imaging infrastructure.
The list of the different work packages (WP) of the project:
- Work Package 1: Project management and coordination
- Work Package 2: Engagement and Liaison of Data Providers
- Work Package 3: Ethical and Legal Aspects
- Work Package 4: Governance and Implementation of the Central Hub
- Work Package 5: Data Federation & Interoperability Framework
- Work Package 6: Federated data processing and analysis
- Work Package 7: Use cases for platform expansion and validation
- Work Package 8: Business & Sustainability models
Sciensano is involved in work packages 1, 5, 7 and 8. For the WP7, Sciensano proposed a use-case (Belgian Precision pilot study) aiming at demonstrating the usability of the EUCAIM platform for new data incorporation which will serve as a basis for federating new cancer images databases.
Sciensano's project investigator(s):
Service(s) working on this project
Partners
