Our partner, Ivan Milošević, acting as the Data Protection Officer (DPO) at IMGGE, will be responsible for ensuring that the distributed AI learning module meets GDPR requirements. This includes carrying out a risk assessment regarding the impact of the AI module on the rights and freedoms of citizens and ensuring that the transfer of IMGGE data to consortium members complies with local data transfer requirements.
The Better Project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Program and the UK Research and Innovation Program. The project aims to support the improvement of European citizens’ health by creating, developing, and implementing a robust decentralized privacy-preserving infrastructure. This infrastructure will empower researchers, innovators, and healthcare professionals to exploit the full potential of larger sets of multi-source health data via tailored AI tools. These tools will allow for secure, cost-effective comparison, integration, and analysis of the data, fully complying with present GDPR privacy guidelines.
The proposed clinical use cases focus on evidence-based research on the following pathologies:
- Pediatric Intellectual Disability
- Inherited Retinal Dystrophies
- Autism Spectrum Disorders
To address privacy and ethical concerns, the project will use a federated learning approach rather than collecting personal data at a central location. The AI module will be trained across multiple locations – hospitals and research institutions. Each party involved in the project will train the AI module on their own premises using their own data. The trained model parameters, rather than the personal data, will then be repeatedly sent to a central server to improve the module.