The EU Commission presents the European Cancer Imaging Initiative which will build upon the results of INCISIVE and other related projects
Published on 24/01/2023
The European Commission has announced the launch of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative, an EU state-of-the-art platform to demonstrate the power of Artificial Intelligence and digital technologies to beat cancer. INCISIVE will be a major contributor to this initiative as one of the repositories that, through the EUCAIM project, will be linked to the infrastructure to be developed and made available by this initiative.
The initiative aims to foster innovation and deployment of digital technologies in cancer treatment and care, and to achieve more precise and faster clinical decision-making, diagnostics, treatments and predictive medicine for cancer patients. With this purpose, the initiative will make datasets 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. This will be done by creating a federated European infrastructure for cancer image data, developed by the EUCAIM project.
EUCAIM project
The EUCAIM project originates from the work and expertise of the AI for Health Imaging Network (AI4HI), composed of 86 affiliated institutions from 20 countries involved in 5 large EU-funded projects on big data and AI in cancer imaging: INCISIVE, Chaimeleon, EuCanImage, ProCancer-I, and Primage. EUCAIM builds upon the progress achieved by these projects regarding system architecture, reference APIs, metadata, data structure and quality, legal requirements, and repositories.
EUCAIM will establish and deploy a pan-European digital and federated infrastructure of FAIR pan-cancer anonymized images, and provide a research platform for the development and benchmarking of AI tools toward precision medicine.
The scientific coordinator of the project is Prof. Luis Marti-Bonmati, from the University Hospital La Fe (HULAFE) in Valencia (Spain), and the project manager Peter Gordebeke, from the European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research (EIBIR) in Vienna (Austria). EUCAIM will start in January 2023 and conclude in December 2026.
As the EU Commission points out in this article, EUICAM is “the cornerstone of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative” which is, at the same time, 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 (HPC) to combat cancer”.
