This week, the Commission held a launch event for its new European Cancer Imaging Initiative, which aims to create a digital infrastructure linking up resources and databases of cancer imaging data across the EU.
This flagship action derives from Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and will contribute to its objective of making the most of the potential of data and digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or High-Performance Computing (HPC) to combat cancer. It will connect EU-level and national initiatives, hospital networks, as well as research repositories with imaging data and other relevant health data. Combining technological innovation with data protection will create a trusted framework for researchers, innovators, doctors, and patients.
Through the European Cancer Imaging Initiative, research organisations, institutions, and companies will be able to work together to design the infrastructure that will:
- Give European clinicians, researchers and innovators easy access to large amounts of cancer imaging data;
- Support the testing and development of tools for personalised medicine to advance cancer diagnostics and treatments;
- Support the creation of new, and the interoperability of existing, cancer image datasets, in line with the European Strategy for Data.
The first stage of the Initiative will start with two multilateral projects recently awarded funding under the Digital Europe Programme:
- ‘European Federation for Cancer Images’ (EUCAIM) project, through which 76 partners will deploy a pan-European digital federated infrastructure of FAIR cancer-related, de-identified, real-world images (€18 million EU co-funding); and
- ‘AI Testing and Experimentation Facility for Health’ (TEF-Health) project, to be established by a cluster of five Horizon 2020 projects to test EUCAIM cancer images in real-life environments.
The Commission expects the design of the new platform to be completed by December 2023. The deployment and testing phase with data providers will be carried over in 2024 and 2025. The digital infrastructure is planned to be fully operational and running in 2026.