UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA (Coordinator), Spain
UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT, Netherlands
ERASMUS UNIVERSITAIR MEDISCH CENTRUM ROTTERDAM, Netherlands
BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER – CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION, Spain
FUNDACIO CENTRE DE REGULACIO GENOMICA, Spain
UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS FOR MEDICAL SCIENCES, United States of America
BIOBANKS AND BIOMOLECULAR RESOURCES RESEARCH
INFRASTRUCTURE CONSORTIUM (BBMRI-ERIC), Austria/ 3rd Party of BBMRI: Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e.V. (TMF), Germany
UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAIS VASCO/ EUSKAL HERRIKO UNIBERTSITATEA, Spain
LYNKEUS, Italy
COLLECTIVE MINDS RADIOLOGY AB, Sweden
RADIOMICS, Belgium
SIEMENS HEALTHCARE GMBH, Germany
EIBIR GEMEINNUTZIGE GMBH ZUR FORDERUNG DER ERFORSCHUNG DER BIOMEDIZINISCHEN BILDGEBUNG, Austria
EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF ONCOLOGIC IMAGING ESOI EUROPAISCHE GESELLSCHAFT FUR ONKOLOGISCHE BILDGEBUNG, Austria
EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR CANCER RESEARCH, United Kingdom
UNIVERSITA DI PISA, Italy
FUNDACIO CLINIC PER A LA RECERCA BIOMEDICA, Spain
UMEA UNIVERSITET, Sweden
GDANSKI UNIWERSYTET MEDYCZNY, Poland
LIETUVOS SVEIKATOS MOKSLU UNIVERSITETO LIGONINE KAUNO KLINIKOS, Lithuania
UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA (UB), Spain
The University of Barcelona (UB) is one of the oldest universities in Spain and the largest university in Catalonia. It has over 60,000 students and 5,000 researchers, as well as 340 graduate and 48 doctorate programs in 16 faculties (including mathematics, informatics, medicine and biology). UB is particularly interested in fostering international relations and, for many years, has managed an average of 150 European projects per year. This project will be carried out by the research team of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab at the University of Barcelona (BCN-AIM), which is an essential part of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. The research team has an established track record in coordination and participation in national, European and international projects on data science and AI (e.g. EuCanImage, euCanSHare, EarlyCause, LONGITOOLS).
UB is the Project Coordinator, leads the implementation of the integrated AI development platform in WP5, and contributes to the AI assessment platform in WP6, in particular for estimating uncertainty and addressing AI errors. UB also participates to the design, implementation and iterative testing of the AI solutions for the clinical use cases in WP2.
UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT (UM), Netherlands
Maastricht University is a top-ranked international university, renowned for the quality of the research undertaken in many areas and hosts 16.800 students in international BA, MA and graduate programs, and 3.500 (FTE) employees. Researchers at UM work in multidisciplinary teams and in close cooperation with international institutes, business and industry.
UM brings its experience with the Radiomics Quality Score (RQS) and in-silico clinical trials, as well as in clinical oncology and radiology, to build the a novel EuCanImage AI assessment platform (WP6), including metrics, criteria and procedures for clinical assessment. UM also implements solutions for imaging standardisation and interpretability (WP4 and 5).
ERASMUS UNIVERSITAIR MEDISCH CENTRUM ROTTERDAM (EMC), Netherlands
Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam is an innovative centre for high-quality medical research, education and care. The overall research aim of EMC is to translate bench discoveries to bedside applications. The Department of Radiology & Nuclear Medicine is one of the largest, most advanced medical imaging departments in Europe. The Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam (BIGR) is a joint initiative of the Departments of Medical Informatics and Radiology & Nuclear Medicine. Through innovative fundamental and applied research, BIGR develops and validates advanced techniques for the processing and analysis of large, complex, and heterogeneous biomedical image data sets.
EMC is involved in the inventory of available relevant information and knowledge models and standards to describe imaging data relevant for the catalogue (WP3), standards/specifications (pseudo)-anonymization requirements for integration of imaging data in cohort databases (WP4), activities regarding imaging data storage and access and interoperability with other data, specifically linking imaging databases such as XNAT, and image derived data, to other types of data (WP3), training activities related to imaging (meta) data and liaison with Euro-BioImaging and BBMRI (WP7).
BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER – CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION (BSC), Spain
BSC is a public research centre devoted to enhance research in many different fields by providing HPC resources to different communities, and by directly generating knowledge in different areas, such as computing, earth, life sciences and Computer Applications in Science and Engineering. It hosts the MareNostrum 4, one of the PRACE (European supercomputing infrastructure) supercomputers. Furthermore, in June 2019 the BSC was selected by EuroHPC as the hosting entity for one of the three large European pre-exascale supercomputers, the new MareNostrum 5. The Life Sciences Department integrates the independent research of senior scientists that work on various aspects of computational biology, ranging from bioinformatics for genomics to computational biochemistry and text mining.
BSC contributes to the design, development, and deployment of the EuCanImage technological infrastructure. BSC also brings the connection with ELIXIR, which aims to support and contribute towards the development of standards in the Life Sciences domain.
FUNDACIO CENTRE DE REGULACIO GENOMICA (CRG), Spain
CRG is a non-profit foundation created as a partnership between the Catalan Government and the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and affiliated with the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The CRG hosts 7 scientific and technical cutting-edge core facilities, including the Genomic Unit, and the Bioinfomatic Units (offering scientific user training, application development and custom-designed data analysis to researchers and the other core facilities). The centre is also part of pan-European infrastructure networks (e.g. Elixir, EuroBioImaging, MuG), as well as large international initiatives (ENCODE, GTEX).
CRG contributes to WP2 in the population of the project catalogue. It is particularly involved in WP3 on data repositories linkage of imaging and non-imaging data and data access and further in WP4 by contributing to the further enhancement of the data and quality control. CRG also participates in the exploitation of the data metamodel for cancer genomics and health data.
UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS FOR MEDICAL SCIENCES (UAMS/TCIA), United States of America
The mission of UAMS is to improve the health, health care and well-being of Arkansans and of others in the region, nation and the world through research, education and state-of-the-art healthcare delivery. Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) facilitates UAMS’ focus on advanced informatics and analytics as the basis of 21st century biomedical and translational research. DBMI’s twenty-nine primary and eleven secondary faculty are engaged in collaborative informatics research from the molecular scale to human populations. DBMI researchers created and continually enhance the US National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), a Data Sharing Repository, which supports a global research community with open access imaging data.
UAMS/TCIA leads WP4 that will define and implement the methods for data anonymisation, curation, annotation and enhancement. UAMS also contributes to WP3 for achieving interoperability between TCIA and EuCanImage, and linking TCIA as one of the nodes of EuCanImage. Importantly, UAMS provides guidance and advice in all relevant WPs based on accumulated experience in TCIA.
BIOBANKS AND BIOMOLECULAR RESOURCES RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE CONSORTIUM (BBMRI-ERIC), Austria
BBMRI-ERIC improves the accessibility and interoperability of the existing comprehensive collections, either population-based or clinical-oriented, of biological samples from different (sub)populations of Europe. Combined with the expertise of the clinicians, pathologists, bio-informaticians, and molecular biologists involved, a globally unmatched, Europe-wide platform for translational medical research is envisaged with the aim to develop personalized medicine and disease prevention for the benefit of European citizens. BBMRI-ERIC is set up as a distributed research infrastructure and consists of 20 Member States and one International Organisation, making it one of the largest research infrastructures for health research in Europe.
BBMRI-ERIC offers assistance on topics that are crucial in biobanking, such as informed consent and data protection amongst others, in order to promote compliance with regulatory requirements and best practice principles. As a consequence BBMRI-ERIC’s ELSI Services & Research collaborates on legal apects, ethics of AI and stakeholder-related tasks in EuCanImage (WP1, WP7).
3rd Party of BBMRI: Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e.V. (TMF)
TMF is a member-based non-profit organisation, which brings together the German academic community in biomedical and healthcare research including University hospitals in various topic groups. These topic groups develop concepts, standards and templates with a focus on data protection law, interoperability, IT and data quality and research politics. TMF has edited the “Guide to data protection in medical research projects: TMF’s generic solutions 2.0.”, agreed with all German data protection authorities (on State and federal level). TMF represents the community with regard to the relevant authorities and the legislator as well as on the international level and is a permanent partner of The German Health Ministry in developing strategies for eHealth and big data applications in healthcare. It leads the Coordination and Support Action in the role of an overall coordinator of the national Medical Informatics Initiative in Germany and is a coordinating partner in initiatives such as the national research network of university medicine (NUM) building a Covid-19 research plattform. TMF also conducts the CSA for the National Initiative on the Standardization of Healthcare Research Registers in different disease areas. TMF is a partner of many research projects funded by the Ministries of Health, Research and Economics and hosts a variety of national congresses.
TMF provides GDPR-expertise to WP1.
UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAIS VASCO/ EUSKAL HERRIKO UNIBERTSITATEA (UPV/EHU), Spain
UPV/EHU is a public teaching and research institution. The Chair in Law and the Human Genome, in the UPV/EHU develops a cross disciplinary analysis of the legal implications of the advances in biotechnology and biomedicine. The Chair edits the Law and the Human Genome Review (more than 50 issues) and a collection of monographs. Its members participate in several Research Ethics Committees and Commissions and collaborate with public administrations (local, national and European) drafting legal and ethical texts in their field of expertise.
UPV is involved in WP1, assessing data ethics, AI, societal concerns and privacy issues. Specially, UPV collaborates in the comparative legal analysis and will lead the design of a concrete policy and contractual framework to ensure that all mandatory obligations are duly met by all EuCanImage stakeholders.
LYNKEUS (LYN), Italy
Lynkeus is an independent research and consultancy firm specialized on clinical implementation of computerized applications in healthcare. In collaboration with hospitals and labs, the group designs decision support solutions, large-scale biomedical data sharing platforms and simulations systems for biomedical R&D, guiding their development, validation and clinical implementation. With over 15 years of experience in large scale, EU-funded projects, Lynkeus delivers tangible innovation by integrating deep clinic, technological, managerial and legal competencies.
Lynkeus leads WP1 working on legal and ethical analyses from which technical specifications for the platform will be generated, developing in a privacy-by-design fashion the system architecture. LYN also implements the blockchain based data access control system and AI passport. Finally, LYN leads exploitation and innovation planning tasks in WP7.
COLLECTIVE MINDS RADIOLOGY AB (CMRAD), Sweden
Collective Minds Radiology AB builds an online global collaboration platform for radiology and medical imaging. The platform manages full industry standard DICOM stacks, manages complex patient cases containing multiple radiological studies and comes with an integrated, exchangeable zero-footprint viewer. The platform comes ready for pluggable AI algorithms to interact with the human community, deploys a fast and stateless integration proxy at participating hospitals and was designed to allow for tailoring of many differentiated workflows within the platform.
CMRAD provides expertise and reference implementations of the privacy by design, ethics, legal framework, privacy compliance and IT security in WP1, provides a multi-tenant platform for collaboration sourcing radiology expertise and capacity integrated with the overall web-portal in WP3, enables and customises a subset of its SaaS platform Collective Minds with the purpose of enabling collaboration and distributing the workload between radiologists providing the image annotation functions for EuCanImage in WP4 and enables the choice of multiple medical image viewers and annotation tools seemlessly integrated into the overall workflow.
RADIOMICS (ONCO), Belgium
Radiomics is a next generation Liege-based imaging start-up company built upon the unparallel experience of its founders, pioneers of the radiomics science. Radiomics focuses on AI powered healthcare, with a unique expertise in Radiomics, Deep Learning & Federated Learning applied to oncology and other therapeutic areas. Through our proprietary advanced image analysis technology, we aim to unravel the gold mine of hidden data information embedded in standard medical images. Our final goal is to support insight-based decision making for optimizing pharmaceutical and biotech companies’ clinical trials and drug development studies and for providing clinicians with a patient-centered approach based on personalized medicine. With this aim, Radiomics’ R&D team is continuously working on new solutions, in collaboration with multiple national and international partners.
ONCO will develop and validate an AI solution for semi-automatic liver cancer detection, classification, and reporting from medical images (WP2). Furthermore, Radiomics will leverage its cost-benefit analysis tool and adapt it for the three cancer domains in EuCanImage (liver, colorectal, breast). Radiomics has brings extensive knowhow on commercialisation and entrepreneurship (WP7).
SIEMENS HEALTHCARE GMBH (SIE), Germany
Siemens Healthineers is one of the largest technology providers for medical imaging technology, laboratory diagnostics, and clinical IT solutions. Siemens Healthineers is a pioneer in the use of AI for medical applications for more than 20 years. The working group “Artificial Intelligence Germany” is part of the “Digital Technology & Innovation” department of Siemens Healthineers. The team’s research focuses on medical image processing, data integration, machine learning and pattern recognition, as well as image-based decision-making and intervention support. Next to pre-development, the working group focuses on the translation of developed technologies and prototypes into innovative products and services.
Siemens Healthineers contributes mainly to WP2, proving the operational readiness and benefits of the platform by developing a number of AI solutions for different clinical use cases (colorectal and breast). They also participate to defining the data metamodel for cancer health data (WP3), as well as to the implementation and testing of the AI passport.
EIBIR GEMEINNUTZIGE GMBH ZUR FORDERUNG DER ERFORSCHUNG DER BIOMEDIZINISCHEN BILDGEBUNG (EIBIR), Austria
EIBIR is a non‐profit organisation dedicated to coordinating biomedical imaging research in Europe and provides support services to researchers in the field of biomedical imaging, such as proposal preparation, project coordination and management of international research projects and clinical studies. EIBIR has its head office in Vienna, at the headquarters of the European Society of Radiology (ESR), EIBIR’s main shareholder. EIBIR currently has a network of 70 member institutions from 22 countires across Europe. It includes clinical and basic science departments as well as biomedical imaging industry.
EIBIR manages the project’s dissemination activities (WP7). EIBIR’s network of members and contacts throughout the field of biomedical imaging will bring significant added value to the project and benefit the outreach activities of project results.
EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF ONCOLOGIC IMAGING – ESOI EUROPAISCHE GESELLSCHAFT FUR ONKOLOGISCHE BILDGEBUNG (ESOI), Austria
ESOI is a non-profit organisation, dedicated to promoting and coordinating the scientific, philanthropic, intellectual and professional activities in oncologic imaging. The Society’s mission is to serve the health care needs of the public through the support of science, teaching and research and the quality of service in the field of oncologic imaging. The current 1500 active members mainly work in academic centres and come from 88 different countries all over the world, with a member majority within Europe.
ESOI participates in the project’s dissemination and communication activities, which will involve the organisation of dissemination events. Two project-dedicated workshops will be organised by ESOI, hosted within the ESOI annual meeting for the cancer imaging community.
EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR CANCER RESEARCH (EACR), United Kingdom
The European Association for Cancer Research is a professional society and global community of cancer researchers with more than 10,000 members in 100+ countries. The EACR`s mission is ‘The advancement of cancer research for the public benefit: from basic research to prevention, treatment and care.’ The EACR facilitates communication and collaboration within the cancer research community and organises high quality scientific conferences. The EACR also sets out to raise the profile of cancer research in Europe and to make the case for sustained political and economic support.
EACR contributes to WP7: Dissemination, communication & exploitation, leveraging its global membership and partners to raise the profile of the project and to identify and involve stakeholders, targeting the cancer research community at large.
UNIVERSITA DI PISA (UNIPI), Italy
UNIPI is represented by the Department of Translational Research and New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery. The Department includes the following academic units: Clinical Oncology, Surgery, Pathology, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Internal medicine, Radiology, Radiation Oncology and Clinical Pharmacology. Those academic units are also part of the Imaging Department of the Pisa University Hospital. The Imaging Department groups two Academic Units of Diagnostic Radiology and one Academic in Neuroradiology, one Academic Unit of Nuclear Medicine, one Interventional Radiology Unit and one Breast Unit. An Academic Unit of radiation Oncology Unit is linked with the Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine in the management of oncologic patients.
UNIPI is involved in WP2, for new cancer imaging data depositions, as well as for defining clinical requirements and validating the AI solutions for the liver, colorectal and liver cancer use cases. UNIPI also participates in defining criteria and methods for assessing clinical effectiveness .
FUNDACIO CLINIC PER A LA RECERCA BIOMEDICA (FCRB), Spain
FCRB was created to manage and promote the research activities of Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (HCB). The Department of Medical Imaging (CDI) is an international reference department involve in multiple trials with different specialties, being oncology one of the most important field. The Clinical Institute of Hematology and Oncology (ICMHO) is a national and international reference center in the care of people with malignant blood diseases and solid tumors. The Department of Medical Informatics has a large experience in Electronic Health Record implementation, use of clinical terminologies and vocabularies and Biomedical Knowledge representation based upon ontologies.
FCRB, through its departments involved, will be contributing with biomarker identification and quantification in WP2, also helping to a better understanding of the aetiologies of liver and breast cancer. They will also participate to defining criteria and methods for assessing clinical effectiveness in WP7.
UMEA UNIVERSITET (UmU), Sweden
Umeå University is Sweden’s fifth oldest university. It is also a hub for research in AI and also in ethics in AI. The medical faculty is the largest faculty at the university, with research in the forefront in radiation treatment, prostate cancer, neuro-science including imaging and paediatrics especially in preterm born and nutrition. The centre, Molecular infection medicine Sweden (MIMS.umu.se) is partner in Nordic EMBL node and also one of four parts in Wallenberg Center for Molecular Medicine (WCMM) in Sweden.
UMU is involved in the clinical tasks regarding colorectal and breast cancer and also participates to defining criteria and methods for assessing clinical effectiveness. UMU leads the Clinical Consensus Group in WP2.
GDANSKI UNIWERSYTET MEDYCZNY (GUMed), Poland
The Medical University of Gdansk (GUMed) is a renowned institution with a long history of teaching and research in the Life Sciences field. Their key functions, besides teaching, are focused on basic and applied research in different fields of life and medical sciences and their implementation into the clinical practice. Main WP tasks will be carried out in the Department of Oncologic Surgery in cooperation with 2nd Department of Radiology, Department of General Surgery and Department of Oncology and Radiotherapy. The main scientific domains are breast cancer, bowel cancer, gastric cancer and melanoma.
GUMED participates at all levels of clinical partners’ involvement. As a clinical leader of WP2, GUMED is involved in all tasks related to defining the use cases, SOP procedures and metadata models. GUMED will populate the EuCanImage platform with colorectal, liver and breast cancer data and images (CT, MR, MMG) as well as annotate and curate them.
LIETUVOS SVEIKATOS MOKSLU UNIVERSITETO LIGONINE KAUNO KLINIKOS (KAUNO), Lithuania
Hospital of Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU) Kauno klinikos is a public health care institution of national importance, providing health and personal care services at all levels, in accordance with European standards. It is the largest multi-profile medical institution in Lithuania. Hospital vision includes modern medical and socially responsible assistance to the most severe patients. The long-standing traditions that accompany this, together with the innovations introduced, offer greater opportunities for both hospital staff and patients.
Kauno klinikos employs more than 2200 physicians (including residents) and 2300 nursing staff, who provide health care according to the evidence-based clinical practice. The university hospital comprises 39 departments and 4 affiliated hospitals devoted to all internal medicine and surgical specialties, including cardiovascular surgery, neurosurgery, gama knife and organ transplant surgery. In 2019, the annual number of outpatient consultations increased significantly, exceeding 1.3 million outpatient visits and 92 thousand hospital admissions. The Department of Radiology is the largest radiological department in Lithuania with concentrated modern diagnostic and treatment equipment. COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on healthcare services in the entire word. Despite significantly decrease in the planned healthcare services, in 2020 Kauno klinikos performed more than 55 thousand CT scans, more than 11 thousand MRI scans and near 2000 PET scans.
Kauno klinikos is involved in WP2 for a cancer imaging data depositions, the definition of clinical requirements and validation of AI solutions to improve diagnosis of the colorectal and liver cancer. Working group will provide insights on differences in cancer imaging and healthcare systems between different regions of Europe, and the value of AI in standardization of diagnostic and prognostic algorithms.
