The European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) is one of 20 partners of the EuCanImage Consortium, whose €10-million grant proposal has been selected for funding by the European Commission.
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 01 October 2020 and will comprise 20 world-renowned research institutions, companies and clinical centres across Europe and the United States.
“EuCanImage is an unprecedented opportunity to create a long-awaited European platform for sharing and leveraging large-scale cancer imaging and non-imaging data.”
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”.
Jane Smith, Chief Executive Officer of the European Association for Cancer Research, expressed her excitement at the EACR’s involvement, saying: “We are delighted to be a partner in EUCanImage and we are looking forward to contributing to project communication, stakeholder engagement, and dissemination events. With our active and extensive membership base, the EACR is ideally placed to contribute to this European-wide project.”
The EuCanImage consortium consists of the following partners:
- Universitat de Barcelona, Spain (Coordinators)
- Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
- Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, Euro-BioImaging Node, Netherlands
- Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
- Centre for Genomic Regulation, Spain
- University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences / The Cancer Imaging Archive, United States of America
- Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure, Austria
- Universidad del País Vasco, Spain
- Lynkeus Srl, Italy
- Collective Minds Radiology AB, Sweden
- OncoRadiomics SA, Belgium
- Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Germany
- European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research, Austria
- European Society of Oncologic Imaging, Austria
- European Association for Cancer Research, United Kingdom
- Università di Pisa, Italy
- Fundació Clínic Recerca Biomèdica / Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Spain
- Umeå Universitet, Sweden
- Gdański Uniwersytet Medyczny, Poland
- Kauno Klinikos, Lilthuania
