Data infrastructures for AI in medical imaging: a report on the experiences of five EU projects.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the field of medical imaging and has the potential to bring medicine from the era of 'sick-care' to the era of healthcare and prevention. The development of AI requires access to large, complete, and harmonized real-world datasets, representative of the population, and disease diversity. However, to date, efforts are fragmented, based on single-institution, size-limited, and annotation-limited datasets. Available public datasets (e.g., The Cancer Imaging Archive, TCIA, USA) are limited in scope, making model generalizability really difficult. In this direction, five European Union projects are currently working on the development of big data infrastructures that will enable European, ethically and General Data Protection Regulation-compliant, quality-controlled, cancer-related, medical imaging platforms, in which both large-scale data and AI algorithms will coexist. The vision is to create sustainable AI cloud-based platforms for the development, implementation, verification, and validation of trustable, usable, and reliable AI models for addressing specific unmet needs regarding cancer care provision. In this paper, we present an overview of the development efforts highlighting challenges and approaches selected providing valuable feedback to future attempts in the area.Key points• Artificial intelligence models for health imaging require access to large amounts of harmonized imaging data and metadata.• Main infrastructures adopted either collect centrally anonymized data or enable access to pseudonymized distributed data.• Developing a common data model for storing all relevant information is a challenge.• Trust of data providers in data sharing initiatives is essential.• An online European Union meta-tool-repository is a necessity minimizing effort duplication for the various projects in the area.

Considerations for artificial intelligence clinical impact in oncologic imaging: an AI4HI position paper.

To achieve clinical impact in daily oncological practice, emerging AI-based cancer imaging research needs to have clearly defined medical focus, AI methods, and outcomes to be estimated. AI-supported cancer imaging should predict major relevant clinical endpoints, aiming to extract associations and draw inferences in a fair, robust, and trustworthy way. AI-assisted solutions as medical devices, developed using multicenter heterogeneous datasets, should be targeted to have an impact on the clinical care pathway. When designing an AI-based research study in oncologic imaging, ensuring clinical impact in AI solutions requires careful consideration of key aspects, including target population selection, sample size definition, standards, and common data elements utilization, balanced dataset splitting, appropriate validation methodology, adequate ground truth, and careful selection of clinical endpoints. Endpoints may be pathology hallmarks, disease behavior, treatment response, or patient prognosis. Ensuring ethical, safety, and privacy considerations are also mandatory before clinical validation is performed. The Artificial Intelligence for Health Imaging (AI4HI) Clinical Working Group has discussed and present in this paper some indicative Machine Learning (ML) enabled decision-support solutions currently under research in the AI4HI projects, as well as the main considerations and requirements that AI solutions should have from a clinical perspective, which can be adopted into clinical practice. If effectively designed, implemented, and validated, cancer imaging AI-supported tools will have the potential to revolutionize the field of precision medicine in oncology.

Open DeveloperSpace: An Enabling Infrastructure for Stakeholders to Generate New Access Solutions.

The DeveloperSpace, one of the core components of GPII, is a self-sustainable infrastructure and collaborative environment, where developers, implementers, consumers, prosumers and other directly and indirectly involved actors (e.g. teachers, caregivers, clinicians) may interact with and play a role in its viability and the development of new access solutions.

Using the Assistance on Demand Platform to Set Up a Network of Assistance Services.

The Assistance on Demand (AoD) platform is a novel open-source infrastructure which enables the set-up and web publication of assistance services. This paper focuses on the potential of the AoD functionality to enable the configuration and creation of a Network of Assistance Services (NAS) by non-expert users (e.g. consumers, family members).