Quibim, a medical imaging technology partner, joins the European Commission's European Federation for Cancer Images (EUCAIM) project directing major tasks focused on governance and implementation of the Central Hub and data federation and interoperability.
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This first-of-its-kind European 'pan-cancer' project aims to create an easy-access to cancer images for clinicians, researchers and innovators to streamline cancer diagnosis, treatment and care.
The infrastructure will be populated by observational studies from 21 clinical sites in 12 EU countries.
Moreover, the project will include clinical images and their link with pathology, molecular and laboratory data, expanding to at least 30 distributed data providers from 15 countries by the end of the 4-year project.
Quibim is strategically positioned in EUCAIM as the first company in funding resources, leveraging its experience implementing QP-Discovery, their imaging and multi-omics platform with cutting-edge technology for transforming imaging data into actionable predictions.
The company will adapt its platform and provide the marketplace to meet the requirements related to the analysis, annotation and exploitation of data and third-party data transfer services through QP-Discovery.
Quibim will lead the EUCAIM Data Preprocessing tools and services contributing to the development of imaging quality control and curation.
In addition, Quibim will be in charge of the image and feature harmonization pipelines to guarantee the minimization of batch effects on the datasets used to train models in the EUCAIM infrastructure, providing tools for the harmonization of feature-based datasets.
The EUCAIM project is a pan-cancer initiative that analyzes common elements between different types of tumors to develop more effective cancer therapies.
The project, which has 76 partners, aims to create a digital infrastructure for storing and analyzing cancer images without any identifying patient data.
Furthermore, this federated project 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, diagnosis, treatments, and predictive medicine for cancer patients.
The EUCAIM project brings together clinical data providers, researchers, research infrastructures and industry partners with innovative solutions that address the challenges of implementing such a cancer imaging infrastructure.
The infrastructure will feature complex and simple oncological anomalies, with over 60 million anonymized cancer image data, and include data from more than 100,000 patients.
EUCAIM will provide access to health professionals, researchers, and innovators worldwide, while prioritizing data privacy and compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). European laws will govern the infrastructure and consider different countries' unique data management regulations.
Quibim, with its extensive experience in data de-identification, will also provide tools for image deidentification to guarantee compliance with GDPR and for image annotation by means of segmentation masks.
The project builds upon the results of the work of the "AI for Health Imaging" (AI4HI) Network which consists of 5 large EU-funded projects on big data and Artificial Intelligence in cancer imaging: Chaimeleon, EuCanImage, ProCancer-I, Incisive and Primage.
In addition, the project plans to implement at least 50 artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, AI tools and clinical prediction models for researchers within the infrastructure by the end of the project.
These AI tools can detect diseases before they become evident on radiological images, providing early detection and improving the chances of successful treatment.
One example of these tools is Quibim's QP Prostate and QP Brain solutions, which can detect prostate and brain diseases by comparing new images with similar images from a database of known diagnoses.
EUCAIM is a project co-funded by the European Union. ■