Last week, the PANCAIM Consortium met at the premises of CNIO, the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, for the project M24 meeting in Madrid to share updates and align on next steps for datasharing and AI development.
After 2 years of the project, the PANCAIM team reaffirmed the urgent need to improve healthcare and outcomes for pancreatic cancer patients. Overall, the meeting got the consortium a little bit closer to developing impactful and trustworthy AI applications to improve the detection, treatment and prognosis for patients with this critical disease.
Both researchers and clinicians agree that a high quality and sufficient quantity and diversity of source data is absolutely essential for both training and validation of the AI algorithms which should finally serve as decision-making support for doctors in the hospital. Therefore, among others, Partners discussed how to speed up the transfer of data into the central PANCAIM repository and potentially connect to other clinical centers in the future to diversify the data for the most diagnostic outcome.
The next step in the project is to finalise the unimodal AI applications developed by the consortium within Work Package 3, which will identify the most relevant features in radiomics, pathomics and genomics respectively. AI models currently under development were presented and critically reviewed in the meeting with our External Advisory Board, who gave valuable feedback and recommendations which will be taken into account going forward. Subsequently, within Work Package 4, the most promising unimodal features will be integrated into complex multimodal AI models, which take into account all modalities for the most accurate predictions of survival and treatment outcome, and enable the clinical use for personalised medicine. Finally, in work package 5, the developed algorithms will be validated on independent datasets and finally, in real clinical settings.
A big thank you to CNIO for hosting, and thanks to all our partners + EAB members for joining us in Madrid and online for many important discussions and decisions!
