Project number: Project 101100633
Call: DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02-CANCER-IMAGE, Horizon Europe
Project coordinator: European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research (EIBIR), Austria
Partners: 76 partners from 14 countries
Project value: 17,789,829.02 EUR
Funding amount for Łukasiewicz – PORT: 52,083.32 EUR
Project duration: 01/01/2023 – 31/12/2026
Project manager: Dr. hab. Patrycja Gazińska
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative is one of the flagship projects of the European Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP). One of the goals of this plan is to make full use of the potential of data and digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) to combat cancer.
The objective of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative is to support innovation and the implementation of digital technologies in the treatment and care of cancer patients, enabling more precise and faster clinical decision-making, and improving diagnostics and therapy outcomes.
The initiative will demonstrate how medical images can be made accessible, used, and linked, while ensuring a high level of ethics, trust, security, and data protection, in full compliance with EU values and regulations. It will provide European clinicians, researchers, and innovators with easy access to cancer imaging data and related clinical information, in line with the European data strategy and supporting the goals of the European Health Data Space.
Cancer imaging datasets exist for various tumor types but are dispersed among numerous repositories and clinical centers across Europe, making them difficult to access for clinicians, researchers, and innovators.
The European Cancer Imaging Initiative aims to connect these resources and databases into an open, accessible, and user-friendly infrastructure for all stakeholders. This will be achieved through an integrated approach developed jointly with leading European research organizations, institutions, and enterprises.
The infrastructure will support the development, benchmarking, testing, and piloting of tools for personalized medicine, forming the foundation for the next generation of cancer diagnostics and treatment.
The cornerstone of the initiative will be the federated European infrastructure for cancer imaging data, developed under the EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages (EUCAIM) project, funded by the DIGITAL program (with 18% EU co-financing). The project starts with 21 clinical sites from 12 countries and aims to include at least 30 distributed data providers from 15 countries by its conclusion.
The role of Łukasiewicz – PORT in the project
Associate Professor Patrycja Gazińska, PhD (Head of the Biobank Research Group – Łukasiewicz PORT), representing the BBMRI-ERIC consortium, brings extensive experience in digital pathology and artificial intelligence gained at King’s College London, The Institute of Cancer Research, and AstraZeneca. She is involved in the implementation of WP7 (Use Cases for Platform Expansion and Validation). Within this task, she will:
- contribute to the validation of established systems and joint scientific projects;
- evaluate platform performance and provide feedback;
- conduct additional testing, validate, and monitor digital pathology systems in collaboration with laboratories worldwide by developing small case studies;
- provide expertise in the quality assessment of digital images, tissue sections, and biomarkers;
- offer specialized knowledge in visual data quality assessment based on classical pathological evaluation compared with AI-generated data;
- share expertise in developing research scoring systems for academia and molecular biomarkers;
- and lead the validation of digital pathology management systems for research and clinical trial environments.
