Project no:
W2/DIGITAL/20252
Contest:
Projekt międzynarodowy współfinansowany Nr W2/DIGITAL/20252 – Europejska Federacja Obrazowania Nowotworów (akronim: EUCAIM) na podstawie umowy zawartej z organizacją międzynarodową lub podmiotem zagranicznym European Commission o nr 101100633 — EUCAIM
Project coordinator:
Europejski Instytut Badań nad Obrazowaniem Biomedycznym (EIBIR), Austria
Project value:
100 881,00 PLN
Funding:
100 881,00 PLN
Project implementation period:
01.01.2024 – 31.12.2026*
Project manager:
Partenrs:
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative is one of the flagship projects of the European Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP). One of the objectives of this plan is to fully harness the potential of data and digital technologies—such as artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC)—in the fight against cancer.
The aim of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative is to support innovation and the deployment of digital technologies in cancer treatment and patient care, enabling more precise and faster clinical decision-making and supporting the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients.
The initiative will demonstrate how medical images can be accessed, used, and combined while ensuring a high level of ethics, trust, security, and personal data protection, in full compliance with EU values and regulations. It will provide European clinicians, researchers, and innovators with easy access to cancer images and related clinical data, in line with the European data strategy and supporting the objectives of the European Health Data Space.
Datasets related to cancer imaging exist for various cancer types, but they are fragmented across many repositories and clinical centers in Europe and are not easily accessible to clinicians, researchers, and innovators.
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative will strive to link resources and databases with an open, accessible, and user-friendly cancer imaging infrastructure for all stakeholders. This will be achieved through an integrated approach developed jointly with major European research organizations, institutions, and companies.
The infrastructure will support the development and benchmarking, testing, and piloting of tools for personalized medicine, which is a fundamental basis for the next generation of cancer diagnostics and treatment.
The cornerstone of the initiative will be a federated European cancer image data infrastructure, developed through the EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages (EUCAIM) project, funded under the DIGITAL programme (€18 million in EU co-funding). The project starts with 21 clinical sites from 12 countries and aims to involve at least 30 distributed data providers from 15 countries by the end of the project.
The role of Łukasiewicz – PORT in the project:
Dr Eng. Patrycja Gazińska (Head of the Biobank Research Group – Łukasiewicz PORT), representing the BBMRI-ERIC consortium, will be involved in the implementation of WP7 (Use Cases for Platform Expansion and Validation). Owing to her extensive experience gained through many years of work in the fields of digital pathology and artificial intelligence at King’s College London, The Institute of Cancer Research, and AstraZeneca, her responsibilities within this work package will include, among others:
contributing to the reference validation of developed systems and joint scientific projects;
assessing platform performance and providing feedback;
conducting additional testing, validating and monitoring digital pathology systems in collaboration with laboratories worldwide, including the development of small case studies;
providing expertise in the assessment of the quality of digital images, tissue sections, and biomarkers;
providing expert knowledge in the visual quality assessment of data based on classical pathological evaluation compared with data generated by artificial intelligence;
sharing expertise in the development of scoring systems for research studies and molecular biomarkers;
leading the validation of digital pathology management systems for research environments and clinical trials.
*The project funding period under the International Co-funded Projects programme starts on 1 January 2024 and ends on 31 December 2026.
