A consortium led by the technological multinational GMV, with the participation of the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), Fundació TIC Salut Social, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and Fundació ACE - Institut de Neurociències Aplicada, among other partners, has launched the Tartaglia project, with the aim of creating a federated network to accelerate the application of artificial intelligence to health care systems in Spain.

It is a public-private partnership with the participation of 16 state and international entities. It involves agencies, foundations and research institutes linked to the health services of different autonomous communities, universities, spin-offs, SMEs and large international companies.

The project, through the federated network, will allow artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to be trained between different hospitals and health centres in the country, without transferring data outside the health institutions, guaranteeing maximum security, privacy, regulatory and administrative conditions.

In Tartaglia there are several clinical areas that will benefit from the development and training of AI algorithms in the federated network, such as prostate cancer, diabetes and cardiology.

On behalf of VHIR, Dr. Anna Santamaria and Dr. Joan Morote, heads of the Biomedical Research in Urology group, will be leading the project as PIs, leading a work package, the Early Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer. This work package will integrate radiological, genetic and clinical data to search for new biomarkers that improve the early detection of prostate cancer, giving more chances of success to treatments.

Also, the Cardiovascular Imaging unit, led by Dr. Jose F. Rodriguez Palomares, participates in a work package that seeks to improve the acquisition of diagnostic ultrasound images by non-expert personnel, training the algorithms to recognise standard echocardiography plans. Furthermore, the algorithms will be trained to detect the most relevant cardiac pathologies and myocardiopathies in order to discriminate normal studies from pathological studies that require further evaluation by a cardiology specialist. This would reduce hospital pressure to focus resources on patients with pathology.

The Tartaglia project will be funded with around 7.5 million euros from the Next Generation Fund. VHIR will receive almost €1 million of this budget.

TARTAGLIA is part of the program R&D Missions in Artificial Intelligence of the Spain Digital Agenda 2025 and of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, funded by the European Union through the Next GenerationEU funds. The actions carried out will be reported to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation (file number MIA.2021.M02.0005), corresponding to the funds of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.