BIGPICTURE

About BIGPICTURE

Pathology is the cornerstone of the diagnosis of many diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases, and is also critical for the evaluation of the safety of new drugs. It’s based on the examination of tissue samples (glass slides) under the microscope. However, despite its pivotal role, it still relies heavily on the qualitative interpretation by a qualified pathologist.

While the microscope symbolizes the profession, the digitalisation of slides in recent years ignited a revolution: not only images can now be shared and accessed from distant locations, they can also be processed by computers. This opens the door for artificial intelligence (AI) applications to assist the pathologist to help studying disease, find better treatments and contribute to the 3Rs (replace, reduce, and refine animal use in research). However, the development of robust AI applications requires large amounts of data, which in the case of pathology means a huge collection of digital slides annotated with the medical data necessary for their interpretation. Sharing these has so far remained challenging due to the data storage capacity required to host a sufficiently large collection and to concerns regarding the confidential character of the medical information.

To allow the fast development of AI in pathology, the BIGPICTURE project aims to create the first European, ethical and GDPR-compliant (General Data Protection Regulation), quality-controlled platform, in which both large-scale data and AI algorithms will coexist. The BIGPICTURE platform will be developed in a sustainable and inclusive way by connecting communities of pathologists, researchers, AI developers, patients, and industry parties.

The project is divided into four main aspects that concern the large-scale collection of data. First, an infrastructure (hardware and software) must be created to store, share and process millions of images that can be gigabytes each. Second, legal and ethical constraints must be put in place to ensure adequate usage of data while fully respecting patient’s privacy and data confidentiality. Then, an initial set of 3 million digital slides from humans and laboratory animals will be collected and stored into the repository to provide data for the development of pathology AI tools. Finally, functionalities that aid the use of the database as well as the processing of images for diagnostic and research purposes will be developed.

BIGPICTURE is a public-private partnership funded by IMI, with representation from academic institutions, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), public organisations and pharmaceutical companies, together with a large network slide contributing partners.

BIGPICTURE started February 1^st, 2021 and will run for 6 years. However, the platform is meant to last, and the consortium will elaborate sustainability plans to maintain and continue to develop the platform beyond this term.

Lygature in BIGPICTURE

Lygature will support BIGPICTURE with over-all program management, which will be critically important for BIGPICTURE in view of the large number of participants in the consortium. In this role, Lygature will benefit from extensive experience in previous multi-stakeholder collaborations such as the IMI European Lead Factory and APPROACH projects.

Next to this generic role, Lygature will also contribute specific data infrastructure expertise from its existing partnership in ongoing national and European projects. An important role in this domain will be to coordinate the overarching GDPR task force, which should guarantee a robust and consistent implementation of all data protection regulations.

Finally, Lygature will also get involved in the regulatory aspects of BIGPICTURE, in particular for the responsible introduction of artificial intelligence into the pathology domain. Existing relations with regulators as built up within previous IMI projects such as RADAR-CNS and ADAPT-SMART will be used to provide guidance to the project.

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