EuCanImage: A new large-scale international project funded by the European Commission to build a secure and federated imaging platform for next-generation artificial intelligence in oncology
The EuCanImage consortium is pleased to announce that its €10-million grant proposal has been selected for funding by the European Commission, with a perfect evaluation score of 15/15 points. EuCanImage will build a federated, secure, and scalable European cancer imaging platform, with capabilities that will enhance the potential of artificial intelligence in oncology. This 4-year research project will start on October 1st 2020 and brings together 20 world-renown research institutions, companies, and clinical centres from Europe and the United States.
The cancer imaging platform developed by the project will be populated with a new data resource totalling over 25,000 single subjects, which will for the first time allow researchers to investigate unmet clinical needs, e.g. for the detection of small liver lesions and metastases of colorectal cancer, or for estimating molecular subtypes of breast tumours and pathological complete response. Moreover, the platform, built by leveraging the Euro-Bioimaging ERIC research infrastructure, will be cross-linked to biological and health repositories through the European Genome-phenome Archive, promoting the development of multi-scale AI solutions that integrate organ-level, molecular, and other clinical predictors into dense patient-specific cancer fingerprints.
The consortium will also build upon several key European initiatives in data sharing for personalised medicine research, including EUCANCan (cancer genomics and health data sharing), euCanSHare (cardiac imaging and omics data sharing) and EUCAN-Connect (federated data analytics). International cooperation and existing success stories will be leveraged through the participation of the coordinators of The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), the US cancer imaging repository funded by the National Cancer Institute. This will allow EuCanImage to benefit from a unique 10-year long experience in cancer imaging storage, anonymisation, curation, and management.
“EuCanImage is an unprecedented opportunity to create a long-awaited European platform for sharing and acessing large-scale cancer imaging and non-imaging data. It will leverage world-renown expertise in the fields of radiomics/radiogenomics, artificial intelligence, data protection, data management, and clinical oncology”, says Karim Lekadir, EuCanImage’s Project Coordinator from the University of Barcelona.
The EuCanImage consortium consists of the following partners:
- Universitat de Barcelona, Spain (Coordinators)
- Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands (The Dpt of Precision Medicine received 1.008.875 Euro).
- Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam, Netherlands, European Population Imaging infrastructure, EuroBioImaging Node.
- Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Spain
- Centre for Genomic Regulation, Spain
- University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences / The Cancer Imaging Archive, United States of America
- Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure, Austria
- Universidad del País Vasco, Spain
- Lynkeus Srl, Italy
- Collective Minds Radiology AB, Sweden
- OncoRadiomics SA, Belgium
- Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Germany
- European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research, Austria
- European Society of Oncologic Imaging, Austria
- European Association for Cancer Research, United Kingdom
- Università di Pisa, Italy
- Fundació Clínic Recerca Biomèdica / Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Spain
- Umeå Universitet, Sweden
- Gdański Uniwersytet Medyczny, Poland
- Kauno Klinikos, Lilthuania