The CHAIMELEON Open Challenges: a unique opportunity for European scientists to advance cancer research with AI

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• The CHAIMELEON Open Challenges offer a unique opportunity for researchers to collaborate and develop new solutions that can significantly impact cancer diagnosis and treatment.
• The CHAIMELEON (Accelerating the lab to market transition of AI tools for cancer management) project is funded by European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, which promotes scientific excellence, innovation, and international competitiveness.
• Quibim will coordinate and oversee the open challenges, leveraging the company's expertise in applying AI to cancer research and medical imaging.

VALENCIA, Spain, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Europe¹. With 3.7 million new cancer cases in Europe each year, it is clear that clinicians require innovative tools and resources to improve cancer diagnosis, therapy, patient selection, and prediction. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising technology that can support these goals. In the search for new AI opportunities to advance medical research and improve patient outcomes, the consortium partners of the EU-funded CHAIMELEON Project have created the CHAIMELEON Open Challenges.

The CHAIMELEON Open Challenges is a competition designed to train and refine AI models to answer clinical questions about five types of cancer: prostate, lung, breast, colon, and rectal. Participants are challenged to collaborate and develop innovative AI-powered solutions that can significantly impact cancer diagnosis, management, and treatment. They will be evaluated considering a balance between the performance of their AI algorithms to predict different clinical endpoints such as disease staging, treatment response or progression free survival and their trustworthiness. Those who take on the challenge can win a total prize pool of €20,000 per challenge, split amongst the winners, with €100,000 in prizes.

The CHAIMELEON Open Challenges offers a unique opportunity for researchers to collaborate and develop new solutions that can have a significant impact on cancer diagnosis and treatment. The registration for the challenges will open on July 3^rd, 2023 and will be available until the end of August 2023. The challenges will be divided in two phases: the Classification Phase and the Championship Phase.

The Classification Phase will extend from July to September 2023. In this phase, any participant can join and download a highly controlled cancer dataset. The dataset will consist of post-processed (i.e., harmonised) images associated with specific clinical variables, ensuring a level playing field for all participants. The participants will train their AI models and compete to be among the top on the leaderboard.

The Championship Phase will extend from October to December 2023. In this phase the top 40 participants from the previous phase will be invited to compete on an even grander stage, using the CHAIMELEON platform to train their algorithms. This phase will include five different challenges, one for each cancer type (prostate, lung, breast, colon, and rectal), with a total prize pool of 20.000€ per challenge, split among the winners. Original images and associated clinical data, along with different image pre-processing and harmonization tools, will be available to participants who have passed the qualifying round cut-off point. The same computational resources will be assigned to each participant; therefore, each participant can decide which challenges to tackle and apply their strategies accordingly.

Quibim will be the leading specialised company managing the challenges, as it has vast experience in cancer research through AI. Ángel Alberich-Bayarri, CEO and co-founder of Quibim, says, "The excitement of being part of this one-of-a-kind project is immense; we get to participate in what will be a significant step forward in cancer research. The CHAIMELEON Open Challenges are an encouraging opportunity for the scientific community because they will enable researchers to leverage the power of AI to develop new solutions."

The challenges are open to the whole scientific and tech community interested in AI. They are a unique opportunity to showcase how AI can be used to advance medical research and improve patient outcomes within the CHAIMELEON project.

To learn more about CHAIMELEON Open Challenges, visit https://chaimeleon.eu/open-challenges 

About the project

The CHAIMELEON Project develops an EU-wide interoperable repository that will enable researchers, data scientists, and clinicians to develop and validate AI tools for improved cancer management. It aims to create a cloud-based data repository of cancer images. This repository will have multimodality imaging and related clinical data from patients diagnosed with lung, breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers, making it one of the most comprehensive of its kind in Europe. The project brings together a consortium of 18 organisations across Europe, including research institutions, hospitals, and companies specialising in AI and medical imaging:  Fundación para la Investigación del Hospital Universitario la Fe de la Comunidad Valenciana (ES), Universita di Pisa (IT), Universita Degli Studi di Roma la Sapienza (IT), Centro Hospitalar Universitário de Santo António (PT), Policlinico San Donato (IT), College des Enseignants de Radiologie (FR), Universiteit Masstricht (NL), Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin (DE), Imperial College London (UK), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (IL), Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (ES), GE Healthcare (DE), Quibim (ES), Medexprim (FR), Bahia (ES), Matical Innovation (ES), European Institute of Biomedical Imaging Research (AT), Universitat de Valencia (ES).

¹ Eurostat. (March 2023). Causes of death statistics. Statistics Explained.

About Quibim

Quibim was born from the ambition of transforming imaging into a catalyst for precision health. They do this by designing pioneering tools that unlock imaging data to improve patient outcomes. The brand is linked to company values, based on a deep understanding of the modern science of imaging data and finding a way to transform this data into actionable predictions. To achieve this, Quibim partners with top-tier biopharma companies to detect pathologies early and to predict outcomes in oncology/immunotherapy, immunology, inflammation, and neurology using MRI, CT, and PET imaging, leading to new regulatory cleared Medical Devices marketed to healthcare providers. The company is specialised in the development of AI models created by the use of real-world evidence (RWE) projects and biopharma partners to extract new insights from images; thereby developing novel quantitative imaging biomarkers to deeply analyse disease mechanisms, advance drug development, and monitor treatment progress using a whole-body approach.

Quibim leads RWE studies with 100M+ de-identified research imaging registries from 150.000+ oncology patients.

EU funding

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952172.

Disclaimer

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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