European Week Against Cancer: Horizon projects using artificial intelligence and digital means to better detect cancer, treat patients and improve their quality of life

Europe accounts for only a tenth of the world’s population, but for a quarter of the world’s cancer cases. In 2020, 2.7 million people in the EU were diagnosed with the disease, and another 1.3 million people lost their lives to it. The EU has been working to tackle cancer for decades and has recently intensified its efforts with initiatives such as the Beating Cancer Plan.

On the occasion of the European Week Against Cancer, discover a selection of research projects funded by HaDEA that are tackling cancer:

• EUonQoL - Quality of Life in Oncology (Horizon Europe): the project is developing the European Oncology Quality of Life Toolkit (EUonQoL-Kit), which is a set of multilingual and digitally administered questionnaires, co-designed with cancer patients/survivors' preferences and priorities. This toolkit is used for the self-assessment of quality of life at different phases of the disease. The EUonQoL kit is essential to establish patient-oriented policy interventions that recognise the impact on the quality of life of people who have had or are now living with cancer.
• The ProCAncer-I project (Horizon 2020) is developing a cloud-based European image infrastructure with tools and services for handling data related to prostate cancer, which is the second most frequent type of cancer in men and the third most lethal in Europe. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) models will allow to reveal medical image patterns and to accurately distinguish indolent diseases from aggressive ones, allowing early prediction of recurrence and detection of metastases. To date, the project has collected a large volume of data for building AI models across different use cases, comprising over 11 000 patients and 6.7 million images.
• To further address the lack of cancer data availability, the CHAIMELEON project (Horizon 2020) has developed a structured repository of health images and related clinical data (including the patient profile, tumour, treatment, and outcome) of the most prevalent cancers in Europe: lung, breast, prostate and colorectal. This EU-wide interoperable repository facilitates access to large, high-quality sets of anonymised data and contributes to the development and validation of AI tools for improved cancer management. The project has released the final repository prototype, which can now be accessed via a web interface. Currently, an external validation phase is ongoing and the worldwide AI community can train and test their models in the CHAIMELEON platform. The system could further be expanded to cover other types of cancer.

Background

Horizon Europe is the research and innovation programme of the EU for the period 2021-2027.

The aims of Cluster 1 ‘Health’  include improving and protecting the health and well-being of citizens of all ages by generating new knowledge, developing innovative solutions and integrating where relevant a gender perspective to prevent, diagnose, monitor, treat and cure diseases. Horizon 2020 (H2020) was the EU’s multiannual funding programme between 2014 and 2020.