In the context of the World Cancer Day and to mark the two years since the launch of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative (ECII), the European Commission, the European Society of Radiology, and the EUCAIM project consortium held the high-level hybrid event “The European Cancer Imaging Initiative – Joining forces for AI-powered imaging to save lives” on 6 February 2025.
European Cancer Imaging Initiative is one of the flagships of the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP). The Cancer Image Europe Platform under deployment by the EUCAIM project (funded from the DIGITAL programme, 36 million EUR, 50% co-funding rate) is at the cornerstone of the Initiative.
Cancer Image Europe is a robust and trustworthy platform for researchers, clinicians and innovators to access diverse cancer imaging data from EU-level and national hospital networks and research repositories, enabling development, testing and piloting AI-driven technologies. By making large amounts of high-quality data accessible, ready and usable for AI research and innovation, Cancer Image Europe will accelerate the development of AI-based cancer imaging and management solutions, contributing to more precise and faster diagnostics, clinical decision-making, and accurate treatment for cancer patients.
The event was an occasion to discuss major milestones achieved by the EUCAIM project: by December 2024, the central hub of the Cancer Image Europe infrastructure has been set up and the technical validation has been completed. The infrastructure currently links up 57 imaging datasets covering nine cancer types of over 47,000 subjects. 50 AI tools are available within the experimentation platform to 86 registered users. Important steps were taken to align the platform with the developments under the EHDS regulatory framework.
By the end of 2026, more than 100,000 cases and 60 million images are expected to be available through the Cancer Image Europe platform. The infrastructure will involve at least 30 distributed data providers from 15 countries, allowing clinicians, researchers and innovators to collaborate on clinical studies and validation of AI algorithms in a fast and efficient way. The secure infrastructure will allow federated learning of AI algorithms, in respect of all applicable regulatory and privacy requirement and sovereignty of data providers.
Participants discussed future European perspectives for advancing trustworthy AI in radiology and oncology, including in the context of the European AI Strategy and the recently adopted European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation. Moreover, the 19 new EUCAIM project partners were introduced and a number of platform use cases were discussed in more detail.
Source: Shaping Europe’s digital future | News (https://tinyurl.com/4a6xx5zr)