"To realize the transformative promise of healthcare AI in the early detection of pancreatic cancer - and more broadly across the practice of radiology - we need to collectively adopt common standards and principles in managing and utilizing data," said Eugene Koay, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of GI Radiation Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. "Together, medical researchers and industry are doing this, and federated learning helps to ensure we're keeping observations in context, maintaining high-quality data, and collaborating in a very transparent manner that ultimately serves patients."

EDRN, backed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), is a consortium of more than 300 investigators at academic institutions and in the private sector working to discover, develop and validate biomarkers and imaging methods to detect early stage cancers and to assess risk for developing cancer, and to translate these biomarkers and imaging methods into clinical tests.

"Translating research findings into clinical practice requires assurance that an AI model will work consistently across today's increasingly diverse real-world patient populations," said Michael Rosenthal, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Radiology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. "This means we need to be utilizing diverse datasets from the early stages of research, and federated learning is critical to providing globally relevant generalizable methods of finding pancreatic cancer earlier."

Several of the Principal Investigators in this pilot project will present their work and the intended collaboration with Rhino Health during a virtual industry presentation at the upcoming annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The session will take place online on Tuesday, November 30th from 12:15-1:15pm CT, titled "Accelerating AI: How Federated Learning Can Protect Privacy, Facilitate Collaboration and Improve Outcomes."

"We are humbled by the ingenuity and dedication of these leading physicians and scientists, who are revolutionizing clinical medicine, using artificial intelligence," said Ittai Dayan, MD, cofounder and CEO of Rhino Health. "For that, they need to be able to collaborate effectively and efficiently, using a common platform and without the risk of patient privacy breach. We hope that Rhino Health's 'Federated Learning as a Platform' solution will be a useful tool at their disposal and help accelerate the impact of healthcare AI."

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