Our consortium

The RadioVal consortium is a highly experienced and ambitious consortium with a unique blend of assets and expertise uniquely suited to achieve the ambitious objective of a first multi-faceted international validation study in the field of radiomics.

The RadioVal consortium is, first of all, an alliance of 5 European projects (EuCanImage, CHAIMELEON, INCISIVE, TCIA and PRIMAGE) represented by their coordinators, as well as by additional members of these projects. These partners cover a lot of the expertise needed in this project, such as breast cancer care, big data in cancer imaging and FAIR data management, radiomics AI, machine learning in breast cancer, in-silico validation, and dissemination and communication in biomedical imaging. 

To complete the consortium, 6 additional clinical centres join to form a highly diverse international clinical network, covering Southern, Northern, Central-Western and Eastern Europe, South America, Eurasia and North Africa. 

Furthermore, the consortium is reinforced by NHG, a European expert on value-based care, cost-effectiveness analysis and regulatory aspects, especially for emerging digital services. 

Last but not least, SHINE 2Europe completes the consortium as a major European expert in social innovation and participatory democracy.

The participation of Hacettepe University, the Alexander Fleming Institute and Ain Shams University, as representatives of low-to-middle income countries from Eurasia, North Africa and Asia, will demonstrate radiomics scalability and transferability like never before. This promotes diversity and inclusion in AI for healthcare, in particular for women’s health, and inspires best practices to ensure future AI solutions can benefit all the human population well beyond high-income countries. 

List of Partners

Click on each partner to found our more about their role in RadioVal and their expertise.

The RadioVal consortium comprises a wealth of expert leaders and established scholars.

Philippe Lambin (Maastricht University) is the inventor of the radiomics concept in 2012, an Advanced ERC grant winner and a highly cited author (>47,000 in Google Scholar). 

Pascal Baltzer is a member of the Executive Board of the European Society of Breast Imaging (EUSOBI), Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Radiology and co-author of the EUSOBI recommendations for women’s information in breast MRI. 

D. Fotiadis (FORTH) is a pioneer in in silico trials and a highly cited scholar in the field (>18,000 citations). 

Karim Lekadir (University of Barcelona) is the coordinator of the EuCanImage project, General Chair of the 27th MICCAI Conference (Medical Image Computing & Medical Image Computing) and Director of the DA TAETHICS Summer School: “Big Data, Big Implications: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Biomedicine”. 

Fredrik Strand (Karolinska Institute) is the principal investigator of MammoAI, a Swedish study aiming to improve breast cancer screening by applying deep learning to mammographic images, as well as the Cohort of Screen-Aged Women, a multi-million breast image dataset and population-based screening cohort in breast cancer. 

Angel Alberich is co-founder of Quibim, one of the most active European SMEs in the field of cancer image analytics and radiomics, and a Young-Innovator-Under-35 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Carina Dantas (SHINE 2Europe) has more than 20 years’ experience working in health and social care. She is Vice-President of the European Covenant on Demographic Change and Member of the Standing Committee of Policy and Advocacy in the International Health Literacy Association. 

Other members such as D. Meyers (Alexander Fleming Institute), current President of the Argentinian Society of Radiology, Boris Brkljacic (University of Zagreb), past President of the European Society of Radiology, and W. Tantawy (Alexander Fleming Institute), Board Member of the Egyptian Society of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, further illustrate the experience and leadership that is consistently available in all sites to successfully drive the proposed validation study.

RadioVal as access to the most advanced infrastructures that will help implement the project efficiently and successfully.

For example, the University of Barcelona has full access to a MareNostrum Supercomputer (Main cluster with 3,456 48-core nodes and 11.15 Pflops of performance, and the CTE-Power cluster with 52 20-core and 512 GB RAM).

QUIBIM has developed Precision®, an interoperable cloud platform for high-throughput data analytics in medical imaging, which is ISO13485 certified and holds CE mark. 

Maastricht University manages three well-established web-portals in the field of cancer radiomics (radiomics.world and predictcancer.org, which will be leveraged for dissemination and communication activities.

FORTH has its own private cloud infrastructure with an aggregate of 128 CPU cores and 1 TB of RAM. 

The University Hospital La Fe has a dedicated MRI Research Unit for clinical trials and clinical research projects with patients, including modern 3T MR scanners (Philips Achieva TX, multi-transmission). The Medical University of Gdanks has two different breast MRI scanning systems (Magnetom Aera by Siemens and Achieva TX by Philips) and the Medical University of Vienna has two types of Siemens MRI systems,  Prisma with multi-sequence interventional capability and Avanto for performing MRI-guided biopsies.

Our international clinical partners have access to a range of MRI scanners with dedicated breast coils (1.5T Signa General Electric and 1.5T  Ingenia by Philips), which will enable to validate the tool’s robustness and scalability under different imaging equipment and conditions.