Matical Innovation won CHAIMELEON, a new project who aims to create a European database of cancer patients led by the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria La Fe (IIS La Fe)
CHAIMELEON, the second project won together with The Biomedical Research Group in Imaging (GIBI230), of the La Fe Health Research Institute (IIS La Fe) positions Matical Innovation on the map of medical research and innovation as a major consultancy in Spain and Europe.
The consortium has obtained approval and funding for this project, supported with more than €8M from the European Commission through the European program H2020 in the topic SC1-FA-DTS-2018-2020 “Trusted digital solutions and Cybersecurity in Health and Care” (RIA Action).
The total duration will be 4 years and the main goal is to set up a structured repository for health imaging data to be openly reused for research in AI experimentation (training and validation) with different types of cancer that improve the management of the patients.
An EU-wide repository will be built as a distributed infrastructure in full compliance with legal and ethics regulations in the involved countries. It will build on partner´s experience (e.g. PRIMAGE repository for pediatric cancer and the Euro-Bio Imaging node for Valencia population, by HULAFE; the Radiomics Imaging Archive by Maastricht University; the national repository DRIM AI France, the Oncology imaging biobank by Pisa University).
Clinical partners and external collaborators will populate the Repository with multimodality (MR, CT, PET/CT) imaging and related clinical data for historic and newly diagnosed lung, prostate and colorectal cancer patients.
The kick-off meeting of the project was held on 4th of September virtually, due to the Covid-19 pandemic situation, and served for each of the partners to present the objectives and technological challenges posed by the project during the next four years.
To undertake all the milestones of the project, CHAIMELEON is bringing together public and private organisations across Europe to perform collaborative research and development. CHAIMELEON consortium is made up of 18 partners from 10 countries (Spain, Germany, France, Austria, United Kingdom, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands and Portugal) and constitutes an panEuropean eco-system of knowledge, infrastructures, biobanks and technologies on oncology, AI/in-silico and cloud computing addressed to health. They are Hospitals, Universities, R&D Centres and Private Companies:
- Coordinator: Fundacion Para La Investigacion Del Hospital Universitario La Fe De La Comunidad Valenciana (coordinated by Dr. Luis Martí Bonmatí.)
- Participants:
- Universita Di Pisa
- Universita Degli Studi Di Roma La Sapienza
- Centro Hospitalar Universitario Do Porto
- Policlinico San Donato
- College Des Enseignants De Radiologie De France
- Universiteit Maastricht
- Charite – Universitaetsmedizin Berlin
- Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
- Ben-Gurion University of The Negev
- Universitat Politecnica De Valencia
- GE Healthcare GMBH – GEHC
- Quibim Sociedad Limitada
- Medexprim
- Bahia Software
- Matical Innovation
- EIBIRr Gemeinnutzige Gmbh Zur Forderung der Erforschung Der Biomedizinischen Bildgebung,
- Universitat De Valencia
CHAIMELEON is a highly complex program that will study four different types of cancers with high incidence: lung, breast, prostate and colorectal, pathologies that represent a huge social and economic burden, any progress towards improving their treatment will have a very large potential impact.
Lung cancer is the most common in the world with 2.1 million cases in 2018 and the deadliest in the EU, with a standardized rate by sex and age of 24.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. For its part, breast cancer is also common throughout the world. In 2018, 2.1 million cases were registered, being the most common malignant neoplasm in women around the world.
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide with 1.8 million cases and the second deadliest for men in the EU, if we check the age standardized rate of 16 per 100,000 population. Lastly, prostate cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the world with 1.3 million cases in 2018.
The project estimates to add to the repository close to 40,000 cases contributed by the eight clinical partners, including patients with lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer. In addition to that, to prove the universality of the developed models, external collaborations will be considered to contribute with more medical images and clinical data to the common repository,
The development and implementation of computational solutions powered by artificial intelligence algorithms allow the automation of the identification, curation, annotation, integrity protection and harmonization of images, the latter being one of the most important tasks to improve the reproducibility of radiomic characteristics extracted when using large sets of images acquired from multiple scanners and / or centers.
This milestone represents a clear advance in the vision of the IIS La Fe and the GIBI230 group as a singular medical imaging research center of international reference and as a leader in in silico medicine for the modeling, simulation and computer visualization of biological processes in oncology. The first milestone will be on October 2021 with the first clinical datasets made available.
