European Cancer Imaging Initiative

The European Cancer Imaging Initiative, one of the flagship actions of Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, aims to harness data, artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing to combat cancer more effectively. The initiative seeks to unlock the power of imaging and AI for the benefit of cancer patients, clinicians and researchers - helping them make faster and more accurate decisions, improving diagnosis and treatment, and supporting predictive medicine tailored to individual patients. By connecting and sharing imaging and clinical data across Europe, it also supports the European data strategy and the goals of the European Health Data Space.

Across Europe, cancer imaging datasets exist for many tumour types but are often scattered across repositories and clinical centres, limiting their use for research and innovation. The European Cancer Imaging Initiative addresses this challenge by building a single, secure and federated infrastructure that connects these resources and makes them accessible across borders. Developed in collaboration with leading European research organisations, institutions and companies, this infrastructure will simplify the sharing and use of cancer imaging data to develop, benchmark, test and validate new digital tools for personalised medicine. It will help generate evidence of the clinical utility of AI solutions, fostering the adoption of the next generation of cancer diagnostics and treatments in clinical settings.

The key aims of the initiative are to:

• Unite and share imaging data - Connect scattered cancer imaging datasets into a secure, open and user-friendly European infrastructure.
• Enable AI-driven innovation - Support the development, benchmarking and clinical validation of AI tools for personalised medicine.
• Foster collaboration - Bring together healthcare providers, researchers and innovators across countries to advance multi-centre studies while respecting data protection rules.
• Ensure trust and ethics - Guarantee the highest standards of data security, patient privacy, transparency and compliance with EU regulations.
• Translate research into care - Harness imaging and clinical data to develop AI solutions that are ready for clinical deployment, improving the processes of early detection, diagnosis and treatment planning. 

As the initiative evolves, its focus will shift from building and pooling data resources to enabling large-scale, multi-centre AI validations studies. This transition will mark a new phase in which the Cancer Image Europe platform becomes not only a trusted source of federated imaging data but also a catalyst for testing and validating AI solutions in real-world clinical environments. By supporting these collaborative validation efforts, the initiative takes a decisive step towards introducing trustworthy AI across Europe’s healthcare systems.

The initiative will play an important role in achieving the goals of the Apply AI Strategy in healthcare. For example, it will support the flagship action establishing a European network of AI-powered advanced screening centres to accelerate the adoption of innovative AI solutions for cancer prevention and diagnosis.

The Cancer Image Europe Platform

At the centre of the initiative is the Cancer Image Europe Platform, developed by the EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages (EUCAIM) project, funded under the DIGITAL programme (€18 Million in EU co-funding).

The Cancer Image Europe platform provides a central hub linking EU-level and national initiatives, hospital networks and research repositories containing cancer imaging data. Clinicians, researchers and innovators gain cross-border access to an interoperable, privacy-preserving and secure infrastructure for federated, distributed analysis of cancer imaging data.

EUCAIM builds on the achievements of the “AI for Health Imaging” (AI4HI) Network, which clusters 5 large EU-funded projects on big data and AI in cancer imaging:  Chaimeleon, EuCanImage, ProCancer-I, Incisive and Primage. The initiative brings together 95 consortium members from 17 countries, building on the expertise and collaborative framework established across the AI4HI network.

The EUCAIM service offering is featured in the catalogue of the AI Testing and Experimentation Facility for Health (TEF-Health), established under the DIGITAL programme, highlighting the complementarity between the two initiatives. TEF-Health enables small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have developed AI solutions for cancer care to test them in real-life environments.

European Digital Innovation Hubs under the DIGITAL Programme support the roll-out of technologies relevant for the European Cancer Imaging Initiative. They provide innovators with guidance about legal requirements, available testing facilities and a range of services for users and providers of digital solutions, including test-before-invest opportunities, training, networking and access to finance. 

Platform up and running

As of September 2025, the infrastructure connects 83 imaging datasets across nine cancer types, encompassing approximately 107,000 subjects. 50 AI tools are currently available on the experimentation platform to 203 registered users from 16 countries. Considerable progress has been made in aligning the platform with the evolving European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulatory framework.

By the end of 2026, the Cancer Image Europe platform is expected to exceed its target, hosting more than 100,000 cases and 60 million images. The infrastructure is also set to surpass its objective of uniting at least 30 distributed data holders from 15 countries, enabling clinicians, researchers and innovators to collaborate on clinical studies and the validation of AI algorithms swiftly and efficiently. Its secure design will support federated learning of AI algorithms, while fully respecting regulatory and privacy requirements, as well as the sovereignty of data holders.

EUCAIM network expands

In January 2025, the EUCAIM Consortium welcomed new partners from Estonia, Norway and Latvia, significantly strengthening its pan-European network. By bringing in additional hospitals, research centres and clinical partners, the initiative expands the Cancer Image Europe platform, enhancing datasets diversity and access. This supports cross-border AI research, fosters collaboration and speeds up the adoption of trustworthy AI solutions in healthcare.

The Unica: Unified Network for International Cancer Advancement project, funded under the EU4health programme (€3,9 Million in EU co-funding) will further extend the European Cancer Imaging Initiative by adding breast, lung and prostate cancer screening imaging data to its federated infrastructure. The project involves 12 medical centres from Slovenia, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Greece, Germany and Ukraine and aims to demonstrate the adoption and integration of AI-based technologies for cancer image analysis by piloting advanced AI models.

Driving Cancer Screening Forward

The European Cancer Imaging Initiative will support public health policy, in particular cancer screening. The 2022 Council Recommendation on the EU Cancer Screening Scheme sets out very ambitious targets in relation to offering cancer screening to eligible EU population. By supporting evidence generation for AI use in breast, lung and prostate cancer screening, the Initiative will foster AI uptake in cancer screening programmes.

In this context, the BreastScan: Pan-European Breast Image Platform for Advanced AI-based Breast Cancer Screening project funded under the EU4health programme (€3,6 Million in EU co-funding) seeks to build a large-scale, high-quality dataset from breast cancer screening to test innovative AI tools that enhance diagnosis and care. BreastScan brings together 14 data holders across 9 EU countries.

These projects exemplify the broader ecosystem of EU-funded projects working to make cancer imaging data more accessible, interoperable and useful for researchers, clinicians and AI developers, supporting aligned developments under the European Cancer Imaging Initiative and the implementation of the European Health Data Space in the Member States.

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  December 2022:

  Launch of the Initiative

   
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  January 2023:

  Start of the EUCAIM project

   
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  September 2023:

  Early release of the EUCAIM Data Federation Framework with preliminary proof-of-concepts on data federation and harmonisation in at least one cancer type and few selected use cases
   
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  December 2023:

  Requirements analysis and design of the EUCAIM infrastructure completed, collaboration mechanisms established

   
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  December 2024:

  EUCAIM platform validated and populated with data from AI4HI projects

   

  Prototype of federated learning and benchmarking platform available

   
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  September 2025:

  EUCAIM consortium expansion and federation of new cancer images databases into Cancer Image Europe through open calls

   

  Implementation of clinical use cases in the Cancer Image Europe platform

   

  Start of projects UNICA and BreastScan

   
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  December 2025:

  Final release of the EUCAIM platform, including final version of tools and services for data providers and platform users

   
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  2026:

  Full operation of the federated European repository of cancer images data

   
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  2027:

  Expansion of the repository