BSC to collaborate in the prediction of the behaviour of some tumours thanks to AI

01 March 2021

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) participates in a new European project, INCISIVE, which aims at exploring the potential of novel AI tools for enhancing current imaging solutions for cancer cases. The BSC will contribute to the optimization of AI algorithm execution platforms to accelerate the processing of medical data from different centres carrying out cancer research and treatment (hospitals, clinics, research centres, etc.). In this way, it will be possible to integrate different data sources and processing techniques using AI in the same platform, so that professionals in the health sector can make use of it efficiently.

In addition, Barcelona Supercomputing Center will apply methods for the “federation” of data and AI processes provided so that different institutions can make their contributions and, at the same time, use models or distributed data, in compliance with legal, ethical, privacy and security requirements.

The 42-months INCISIVE’s project will focus on lung, colorectal, breast and prostate tumours, and targets two main results. On the one hand, an AI-based toolbox consisting of novel AI models, combined with a set of predictive, descriptive and prescriptive analytics, enabling the multi-modal exploration of the available data sources; this includes a Machine Learning (ML) based automatic annotation system to produce data for the training of algorithms in AI research.

Another expected result is an interoperable pan-European federated repository of health images that allows the donation and sharing of data in compliance with legal, ethical, privacy and security requirements, for AI-related training and experimentation; the repository will operate on a High-Performance Computing as-a-service basis, thereby allowing for the cost-effective performance of computationally intensive processing (such as the clusters specialized in image processing that are part of MareNostrum 4) without the need for maintaining expensive equipment.

The BSC will collaborate both with institutions specialized in the treatment of medical data that use AI models, with entities specialized in ethical and legal data issues, as well as with medical centres, which will be the end users of the proposed methods.