The EU-funded project excelled in delivering Artificial Intelligence (AI) decision-support services and the federated data repository of lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancer images and accompanying clinical data.
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) constituted one of the main contributors to the clinical aspects of the project, which was officially concluded receiving very positive feedback for its results from the European Commission project officer and reviewers.
The project delivered the final prototype of an integrated platform with all planned functionalities, making it available to data providers, data users and healthcare professionals, following appropriate authorisation.
The joint efforts and excellence of the multidisciplinary team of experts involved in this project have made it possible to successfully achieve two main goals:
- An AI toolbox which provides a set of explainable AI services and pipelines that healthcare professionals can use as decision-support tools with positive impact on the clinical workflow. It comprises a total of 28 AI models for lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancer. The main decision-support services relate to the classification of abnormalities, patient prioritization, lesion segmentation and localization assistance, cancer diagnosis and staging and risk for metastasis prediction.
- An interoperable federated data repository of more than 5.5 million anonymized cancer images and accompanying clinical data from more than 11.000 individuals, which allows health data sharing and use among registered stakeholders, in compliance with legal, ethical, privacy, and security requirements, for AI-related training and research experimentation.
The European Commission project officer and reviewers concluded in their report that “many strong and pertinent exploitable results have been created (…). Key assets such as the AI toolbox platform and the federated imaging repository are highlighted for their exploitation potential”. The reviewers also stressed that “the project’s ambitious nature and numerous met key performance indicators demonstrate its potential for substantial scientific, technical, commercial, and societal impacts”.
Ioannis Seimenis, Professor of Medical Physics at the NKUA School of Medicine and scientific coordinator of the NKUA team in INCISIVE, has also applied for the active involvement of NKUA in the Cancer Image Europe initiative, a framework for supporting interoperability, at all levels, among INCISIVE and other existing health data repositories and research infrastructures. Cancer Image Europe is established by the EUCAIM project (Digital Europe Programme), a flagship action of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative, and is pioneering a pan-European federated infrastructure for cancer images fueling AI innovations and fostering the transition from research into clinical practice.
The INCISIVE consortium was coordinated by Maggioli SpA and comprised 26 partners from 9 countries: Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Serbia, Spain and the UK. The project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952179
