The 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 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.

Health data, including medical images, are highly distributed and fragmented in Europe. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a paradigm shift towards data-driven decision making that is revolutionising medicine. In medical imaging, an increasing number of studies are appearing in which AI tools are making important contributions towards a more accurate diagnosis or a more reliable treatment response and prognostic prediction. However, there can be a significant difference between the design and the real-world performance of algorithms, leading to ethical and safety issues. The aim of the EUCAIM project is to address this issue: to deploy a federated, pan-European research infrastructure - the Cancer Image Europe Infrastructure - in order to address the fragmentation of the health data and medical images in Europe.

Cancer Image Europe will support the development and validation of AI tools towards Precision Medicine, enhance (cancer) diagnosis procedures and treatment as well as the identification of the need for predictive medicine.

To achieve this ambitious goal, the project brings together five previously funded projects of the Artificial Intelligence for Health Imaging (AI4HI) project cluster, each of which was focused on a specific aspect of AI and cancer images. By pooling their resources, expertise, research efforts and real-world achievements, and adding additional key players, the EUCAIM project is uniquely position to create and deploy a strong and unified research infrastructure that will accelerate the development and implementation of AI-driven cancer diagnosis and treatment solutions, ultimately improving patient outcomes across Europe.

Furthermore, Cancer Image Europe will also define the legal grounds for the operation of the federated data repository on the European scale by adapting to the particularities of the data management regulations of the different European countries. Preserving the data sovereignty of the data providers has a high priority.

The EUCAIM project consortium consist of 95 partners from 17 countries. Many of the partners are part of the AI4HI initiative or major European Research Infrastructures (such as Euro-BioImaging, BBMRI, EATRIS and ELIXIR).