Radiology leads flagship of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan – Kick-off for federated European infrastructure for cancer images

EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages (EUCAIM) is the cornerstone of the European Commission-initiated European Cancer Imaging Initiative, a flagship of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP), 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, treatment and predictive medicine for cancer patients.

The 4-year project started in January 2023 and joins 76 partners to deploy a pan-European digital federated infrastructure of FAIR cancer-related, de-identified, real-world images. The infrastructure is designed to preserve the data sovereignty of providers and provide a platform, including an Atlas of Cancer Images, for the development and benchmarking of AI tools towards precision medicine. EUCAIM will address the fragmentation of existing cancer image repositories by building on repositories from the AI4HI initiative, European research infrastructures and national/regional repositories and including clinical images, pathology, molecular and laboratory data.

EUCAIM targets clinicians, researchers and innovators, providing the means to finally build validated clinical decision-making systems supporting diagnosis, treatment and predictive medicine to benefit citizens. EUCAIM will define the legal grounds for operation on a pan-European scale, adapting to the particularities of different countries on managing clinical data. EUCAIM will implement a federation of providers compliant with this legal ground, defining common data models, ontologies, quality standards, FAIR principles and de-identification procedures. EUCAIM will provide a comprehensive dashboard for data discovery, federated search, metadata harvesting, annotation and distributed processing, including federated and privacy-preserving learning. EUCAIM will build a central hub to host the Atlas of Cancer Images, enabling development of trustworthy AI tools. EUCAIM will support new providers in building the federation and monitoring the distributed infrastructure. EUCAIM will align with the European Health Data Spaces initiative toward a sustainable flagship repository of high-quality data and tools. EUCAIM brings together clinical data providers, researchers, research infrastructures and industry with mature solutions, addressing the challenges of implementing such a cancer-imaging infrastructure.

EUCAIM is part of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative launched by the European Commission on January 23, 2023 to support healthcare providers, research institutes and innovators in making the best use of innovative data-driven solutions for cancer treatment and care.

The initiative, a flagship action under Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, will work towards creating a digital infrastructure linking up resources and databases of cancer imaging data across the EU, while ensuring adherence to high ethics standards, trust, security and protection of personal data. It will also connect EU-level and national initiatives, hospital networks, as well as research repositories with imaging data and other relevant health data.

EGI is contributing to the development of EUCAIM by working on the platform core developments in addition to coordination of cloud resource provisioning; moreover, it contributes to the management of the scientific data in the project.

Check the EUCAIM press release and the original press release from the European Commission about the launch of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative.