EuCanImage will launch in October 2020 with BBMRI-ERIC on board

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 1st October 2020 and will comprise 20 world-renown research institutions, companies and clinical centres across Europe and the United States.

The EuCanImage platform will be populated with a new data resource totalling over 25,000 subjects, which will allow to investigate unmet clinical needs like never before, such as 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 cancer imaging platform, leveraging the well-established Euro-BioImaging infrastructure, will be cross-linked to biological and health repositories through the European Genome-phenome Archive, allowing to develop multi-scale AI solutions that integrate organ-level, molecular and other clinical predictors into dense patient-specific cancer fingerprints. Furthermore, to foster international cooperation and leverage existing success stories, the consortium comprises the coordinators of The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), the US cancer imaging repository funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Karim Lekadir, EuCanImage’s Project Coordinator from the University of Barcelona, declared: “EuCanImage is an unprecedented opportunity to create a long-awaited European platform for sharing and leveraging 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”.

BBMRI-ERIC will lead 2 tasks in the ELSI work package and will contribute to the dissemination and outreach work package as well.

The EuCanImage consortium consists of the following partners:

1. Universitat de Barcelona, Spain (Coordinators)
2. Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
3. Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, Euro-BioImaging Node, Netherlands
4. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
5. Centre for Genomic Regulation, Spain
6. University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences / The Cancer Imaging Archive, United States of America
7. Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure, Austria
8. Universidad del País Vasco, Spain
9. Lynkeus Srl, Italy
10. Collective Minds Radiology AB, Sweden
11. OncoRadiomics SA, Belgium
12. Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Germany
13. European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research, Austria
14. European Society of Oncologic Imaging, Austria
15. European Association for Cancer Research, United Kingdom
16. Università di Pisa, Italy
17. Fundació Clínic Recerca Biomèdica / Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Spain
18. Umeå Universitet, Sweden
19. Gdański Uniwersytet Medyczny, Poland
20. Kauno Klinikos, Lithuania