With breast cancer becoming the most common cancer worldwide, it is paramount to improve treatment and care. New treatment protocols have shown promise in reducing mortality, such as neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC), but they face important challenges including variability in efficacy and important side effects for patients. RadioVal will validate an artificial intelligence (AI) solution which will support clinicians in selecting the patients that are most likely to respond to neoadjuvant chemotherapy, hence reducing unnecessary treatments and patient suffering due to side effects.
The AI solution built from radiological data, otherwise known as radiomics AI, will be validated in a variety of clinical centres across the world, including from three high-income EU countries (Sweden, Austria, Spain), two emerging EU countries (Poland, Croatia), and three countries from South America (Argentina), North Africa (Egypt) and Eurasia (Turkey). Furthermore, it will validate the AI technology for its accuracy, but also for technical robustness, clinical safety and utility, applicability in the real world, as well as ethical excellence and legal compliance.
This will be the very first international validation of a radiology AI solution in breast cancer with the aim to demonstrate that it can be trusted by clinicians, patients and other stakeholders, and hence it can be deployed and adopted by healthcare centres. The RadioVal study will be implemented through a multi-stakeholder approach, taking into account clinical and healthcare needs, as well as socio-ethical and regulatory requirements from day one to foster acceptance and adoption.
Maggioli will participate in all major RadioVal tasks and will also lead the work package responsible for the development of ΙΤ tools for continuous evaluation, monitoring and traceability of radiomics tools applied in clinical oncology. In this context, Maggioli will lead the design and implementation of a radiomics AI passport by implementing a web-based tool for standardized description and user-friendly creation of new radiomic models, as well as the design of interaction models and implementation of user interfaces to achieve the desired human-machine interaction between the healthcare professionals and the RadioVal radiomics AI tool.
The project started on the 1st of September 2022 and the kick-off meeting was held in Barcelona on the 15-16 of September 2022, coordinated by the University of Barcelona, where Maggioli participated in workshops, meetings and presentations.
The project is funded under the Horizon Europe Programme (2021-2027) through the HORIZON-HLTH-2021-DISEASE-04 call and received a 5.8 million euros funding.