The Italian National Research Council (CNR – www.cnr.it) is the main public research organisation in Italy. CNR’s goal is to perform, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in all the sectors of science and knowledge. CNR consists of about 100 different research institutes that span from human sciences to engineering sciences. In EUCAIM, two CNR units will be involved, belonging to two institutes:
– the Institute of Biostructures and BioImages (IBB-CNR), Naples and Turin
– the Institute of Information Science and Technologies “Alessandro Faedo” (ISTI-CNR), Pisa
ISTI-CNR (www.isti.cnr.it) is the largest CNR institute for Computer Science and is committed to produce scientific excellence and to play an active role in technology transfer in the field of Information Science and related technologies. The ISTI-CNR unit is led by the “Signals & Images” Lab (silab.isti.cnr.it/), a research group working in the fields of multimedia data acquisition, processing and understanding, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and intelligent systems, knowledge representation and modelling, medical imaging understanding, and smart vision systems. The Lab has experiences in big data analytics, based on a multidisciplinary approach to knowledge extraction from large, federated and heterogeneous datasets, and by exploiting the experience gained in statistics, computational topology, and artificial neural networks. The lab is also working on the definition of appropriate methodological and technological measures and approaches to ensure the trustworthiness of AI and ML methods, in terms of transparency, fairness, traceability, explainability and reproducibility. The team has contributed to the FUTURE-AI guiding principles. In the most recent national and international research efforts, the team is working in R&D of AI models for medical imaging data processing on large, distributed platforms, the FAIRification of these models, and their in-production monitoring.
IBB-CNR (www.ibb.cnr.it) has 100 staff units distributed in Naples and Turin that carries out translational research for the development of new tools for prevention, diagnosis and targeted therapies with expertise in multiple imaging modalities provide the interdisciplinary bases to carry out a truly innovative research in the field of molecular imaging and personalized therapy. The IBB has a consolidated experience in the research of biomarkers of various pathologies, design and synthesis of molecules able to interact with certain biomarkers and preclinical validation of the molecules developed. Another research area developed by IBB is e-Health, to create open-source software systems, consisting of models, services and tools to support diagnosis, therapy and follow-up, as well as for the innovative management of health processes.
The Institute is part of the Italian node of the European Research Infrastructure for Imaging Technologies in Biological and Biomedical Sciences (Euro-BioImaging ERIC, www.eurobioimaging.eu) and host the Med-Hub which coordinates the access to biomedical imaging services, the development of tools to make imaging data FAIR.
Role of institution in the project
ISTI-CNR is participating mainly in WP4, WP5, WP6 and WP7, by contributing to the definition of the Common Data Model for imaging and clinical data, the integration of pre-processing and quality assessment tools, data analysis and AI components, and to the definition of use cases and EUCAIM dashboard.
IBB-CNR is participating mainly in WP4, WP5, WP6, WP7 and WP8, by contributing to the development of tools for searchable FAIR Metadata, interoperability, implementation of federated image data analysis, preparation of open calls for data incorporation use cases and contributing to the definition of the long-term maintenance and expansion of the platform.
