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.

First release of Cancer Image Europe platform to fuel collaborative innovation and data sharing across Europe.

September 29, 2023

The EUCAIM consortium and the European Commission are excited to announce the first public release of its platform, Cancer Image Europe, marking a major milestone in the project’s development and an exciting step towards achieving its vision and goals. The first platform release brings benefits to researchers, clinicians and AI innovators across Europe and paves the way for the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Key features and highlights of EUCAIM’s first platform release include:

  • A public catalogue of cancer imaging datasets from the repositories of the EU-funded AI for Health Imaging projects, following a common metadata schema.
  • A federated searching tool to understand the information available in the federated providers.
  • Full integration with the Life Science Login Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure.
  • Reusing and adding value to key components of EU-funded research projects and infrastructure in the field of cancer.

For more information about the first release of the Cancer Image Europe platform and the EUCAIM project, please visit https://dashboard.eucaim.cancerimage.eu/. You can also view a first version of the rules of participation on the website here. Both achievements are included here.

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.

More information about the projects and its achievements is available at www.cancerimage.eu.

Facts and figures

Coordinator: European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research (EIBIR), Austria
Scientific Coordinator: Prof. Luis Martí-Bonmatí, Director of the Medical Imaging Department, Chairman of Radiology, La Fe University and Polytechnic Hospital (Valencia, ES)
Number of Partners: 76
Start Date: January 1, 2023
End Date: December 31, 2026
Total EC Funding: € 17 789 829.02

EUCAIM is co-funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement N° 1011100633. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.