FLUTE: "Federated Learning and mUlti-party computation Techniques for prostatE cancer" project Kicked off in July 2023

The kick-off meeting of the Federated Learning and mUlti-party computation Techniques for prostatE cancer (FLUTE) project was held on 5-6 July at Lille, France.

The goal of the multidisciplinary FLUTE project is to advance and scale up data-driven healthcare by developing novel methods for privacy-preserving cross-border utilisation of data hubs. Through this project, advanced research will be performed to push the performance envelope of secure multi-party computation in Federated Learning, including the associated AI models and secure execution environments.

In the two-day meeting, all eight work packages’ objectives, tasks, milestones, deliverables, partner roles and possible links between WPs etc. were discussed by respective consortium members, along with project overview and next steps.

Miah Raihan Mahmud Arman, the CTO of Technovative Solutions (TVS) attended the meeting and presented the TVS contribution on WP4 ‘FLUTE platform development’. The objective of the work package includes data hub and innovator dashboards; scalability, usability and performance validation; privacy protection strength validation, and documentation and user manual.

To maximise the impact, adoption and replicability of the results, the project is designed to contribute to the global HL7 FHIR standard development, and create novel guidelines for GDPR-compliant cross-border Federated Learning in healthcare.

To demonstrate the practical use and impact of the results, the project will integrate the FLUTE platform with health data hubs located in three clinical sites in different countries, use their data to develop a novel federated AI toolset for diagnosis of clinically significant prostate cancer and perform a multi-national clinical validation of its efficacy, which will help to improve predictions of aggressive prostate cancer while avoiding unnecessary biopsies, thus improving the welfare of patients and significantly reducing the associated costs.

Figure: FLUTE Work Packages (WP) dependencies

The FLUTE consortium includes three clinical / data partners (IRST, CHU de Liège and Vall d'Hebron), three technology SMEs (Arteevo, TVS and Quibim), three technology research partners (INRIA, GRADIANT and UPC), a legal/ethics partner (TIMELEX) and a standards organisation (HL7 Europe Foundation).

The consortium believes that the project will boost the competitiveness of European SMEs and research organisations in the digital age, and increase the productivity and efficiency of the healthcare industry. In accordance with the priorities set by the European Commission, the project targets for collaboration, cross-fertilization and synergies with related national and international European projects.

This project has received funding from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) Research and Innovation Actions under grant agreement No 101095382.