Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionize healthcare as its diagnostic performance approaches that of clinical experts. In particular, in cancer screening, AI could help patients to make better-informed decisions and reduce medical error. However, this requires large datasets whose collection faces severe practical, ethical and legal obstacles. These obstacles could potentially be overcome with swarm learning (SL) where partners jointly train AI models without sharing any data. Yet, access to SL technology is currently limited because no studies have implemented SL in a true multinational setup, no freely usable implementation of SL is available, researchers \& healthcare providers have no experience with setting up SL networks and policymakers are currently unaware of the broader implications of SL.
ODELIA will aim to solve these issues: ODELIA will build an open-source software framework for SL, providing an assembly line for the streamlined development of AI solutions in a preclinical setting. To serve as a blueprint for future SL-based AI systems, ODELIA partners collaborate as a consortium to develop AI models for the detection of breast cancer in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The size of ODELIA's distributed database will be substantial and ODELIA's AI models could reach expert-level performance for breast cancer screening.
Thereby, ODELIA will could not just deliver a useful medical application, but provide evidence to summarize the clinical benefit of SL in terms of accelerated development, increased performance and robust generalizability.
To achieve this, ODELIA partners will collect retrospective, anonymized breast MRI datasets with manual ground truth labels for the presence of cancer, and will train AI models conventionelly and via SL. The performance of these technical approaches will be compared. The aim of the study is to test the methodology of Swarm Learning and the performance of AI algorithms developed within ODELIA on retrospective data. There will be no effect on treatment of patients as all evaluations will be done retrospectively. No patient treatment or any intervention is associated with the study.
