Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that can support cancer detection, diagnosis and treatment. The development of innovative digital solutions relies on data, including cancer imaging data. Cancer imaging datasets exist for different cancer types. Still, they are scattered among many repositories and clinical centres in Europe, and they are not easily accessible to clinicians, researchers and innovators.
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative will work towards overcoming these obstacles by linking up resources and databases to an open, available and user-friendly infrastructure of cancer images for all stakeholders. In fact, the initiative's cornerstone will be a federated European infrastructure for cancer images data, linking EU-level and national initiatives, hospital networks, and research repositories with existing imaging data of cancer patients, designed with major European research organisations, institutions, and companies. Thanks to this federated, distributed infrastructure, clinicians, researchers and innovators will have cross-border access to cancer imaging data and will be able to analyse them, and use them for the development and benchmarking, testing and piloting of tools for personalised medicine. Ultimately, the European Cancer Imaging Initiative will offer a backbone for next generation of cancer diagnostics and treatments.
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative will make 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.
Researchers and innovators will benefit from obtaining access to cancer imaging data within a trusted and secure framework. Researchers will have access to more significant amounts of high-quality data in a more efficient way. This will allow them to advance our understanding of image optimization and cancer presentation and progression. It will also support researchers by enabling in-silico clinical trials, and testing new developments and technology approaches, for example through Artificial intelligence training and validation. Eventually, this will pave the way for a fast development of improved diagnostics, prevention and personalised care.
Industry and companies will also benefit from greater availability of cancer imaging data, which will facilitate the validation and deployment of innovative tools and devices that offer better and more personalised cancer care. In fact, industry will be able to put into market new devices that use Artificial Intelligence technology and train or validate them on a large dataset which is standardised and fully GDPR compliant. This directly supports the use of R&D findings to accelerate the uptake of new marketable solutions.
People will be able to donate their data, entirely in line with our overall EU approach to data protection, and in line with the Data Governance Act.
Cancer patients and clinicians will ultimately reap benefits from this initiative, 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 care.
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative will leverage the results of, and contribute to, several other actions on cancer at European level.
It will make 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.
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 or High-Performance Computing to combat cancer. The European Cancer Imaging Initiative will contribute to improving early detection of cancer (Action 4, 2021-2025) and applying a modern approach to cancer: new technologies, research and innovation at the service of patient-centered cancer prevention and care (Action 2, launching in 2022).
The EU Mission on Cancer aims to improve the lives of more than 3 million people by 2030 through prevention, and cure for those affected by cancer including their families, to live longer and better. In the Cancer Mission Implementation Plan of September 2021, rational integration with the Cancer Imaging Initiative is envisaged to support actions on improving the understanding of cancer (Specific Objective 1), and prevention including screening and early detection (Specific Objective 2). With the aim to optimize diagnostics and treatment (Specific Objective 3), the Mission will support actions to develop a clinical trial programme on diagnostics building on existing and minimally invasive diagnostic techniques, including imaging, and/or implementation research of validated AI-powered integrated diagnostic methods, including imaging (2023-2027). There are clear opportunities for synergy between activities under the Cancer Mission and the European Cancer Imaging Initiative and the EUCAIM project will establish linkages with ongoing relevant Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects within the Cancer Mission.
The ethical and legal framework for the infrastructure will be at the core of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative. It will include aspects of AI ethics, data protection, means for storage, preservation, access rights and policy, in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The EUCAIM project will implement a robust system for cross-border authentication and a robust set of measures to ensure that cybersecurity and privacy are preserved. It will ensure that no sensitive or private data is leaked, implementing a data protection and privacy-by-design and by-default approach. The project will foster a federated learning approach where the data will mainly remain at its source. Images in the Atlas of Cancer Images will be fully anonymized and will contain a minimal amount of annotation (such as type of cancer, age, and gender). More information on the adopted approach is available on the EUCAIM project website.
The cornerstone of the Initiative is the EUCAIM (European infrastructure for cancer images data) project, funded under the DIGITAL programme (18 MIO EU co-funding) which will run until 2026. By 2025 the project will deploy the federated European infrastructure which will be fully operational in 2026. Other projects funded by the DIGITAL Programme, as well as other European and national initiatives on cancer will also contribute to the success of the initiative.
Different options for sustainability are being considered at the moment for the infrastructure that the EUCAIM project will deploy. The options for sustainability are discussed in a dedicated work package within the EUCAIM project, with involvement of project partners and stakeholders. The discussion will be influenced also by the developments under the Data Governance Act and EHDS Regulation.
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative is a Flagship of the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. The implementation and progress on the EBCP are discussed with the Member States in the Sub-group on Cancer under the Commission Expert Group on Public Health.
The EUCAIM project starts with 21 clinical sites from 12 countries (Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Greece, Sweden, France, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Cyprus and Czechia). More information on the partnership and the clinical sites involved in the EUCAIM project is available on the EUCAIM project website.
The EUCAIM project will deploy an infrastructure which will be open to the involvement of new stakeholders. The infrastructure will develop an onboarding process for new collaborators and cancer image data providers (repositories and clinical centres) and will publish an open call for data providers to join the consortium in 2024-2025. EUCAIM will provide a number of services to facilitate connecting new data sources. More details will be available on the EUCAIM project website.
The EUCAIM project and the TEF-Health project represent two complementary pillars of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative. Both projects will collaborate to establish synergies on the technical level. Moreover, EUCAIM will explore possibilities for defining common innovation pathways in collaboration with other projects and initiatives dealing with health data and Artificial Intelligence. EUCAIM has already set up a communication channel with the responsible people in the TEF-Health project. More details will be available on the EUCAIM project website as the project evolves.
EUCAIM will be aligned with the developments under the European Health Data Space (EHDS). The infrastructure for cancer imaging will be one of the collaborators and nodes of the EHDS. This approach will be based on the secondary use of imaging data for research and knowledge extraction. The Genomics infrastructure developed by the GDI project is another node. Both infrastructures will be aligned in terms of standards and operating procedures to link to the EHDS infrastructure when it will be operational.
The European Health Space proposal is under negotiations by the European Parliament and the Council. According to the wording of the EC proposal for Regulation on the European Health Data Space, there are different options for data sharing infrastructures to connect to EHDS which have different implications.
EUCAIM will need to establish a legal structure and define a governance model that ensures regulatory/GDPR compliance for its operations. Depending on the chosen legal and governance model, the infrastructure created in the EUCAIM project could become a data sharing infrastructure in the meaning of Article 52(4). It could then apply to become part of the HealthData@EU infrastructure as an authorised participant. Else, the platform could participate in EHDS as a cross-border source of electronic health data for secondary use (Article 53 of the proposed EHDS Regulation).
EUCAIM takes into account the developments of EHDS and is committed to exploring possibilities for cross-border collaboration on data altruism. Moreover, EUCAIM will pursue the interoperability with the future middleware of Data Spaces (SIMPL).
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The European Cancer Imaging Initiative will unlock the power of imaging and Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of cancer patients, clinicians and researchers.