CAFEIN – What it takes to Predict Disease

CERN’s Federated Learning Platform allowing AI Training without Sharing Data.

The age old question poses; What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force? Well in the world of healthcare, we clearly see a scenario wherein the unstoppable force of AI solutions, meets the immovable object of data protection. Seemingly there is a block in the system. Yet in recent years CERN’s Federated Learning Platform, CAFEIN, seems to have risen as the intermediary umpire of these two powerful characters. Allowing AI training whilst innovatively protecting sensitive patient data. Recently this has allowed the CAFEIN project to expand its international collaborations for stroke and breast cancer prevention.

CAFEIN, is a Federated Learning Platform with the ability to train AI models locally and then federate only the intelligence learnt from the data, into one conglomerating model held on CERN protected servers. This method allows AI models to be accurately and efficiently trained without sharing direct patient data between nodes (hospitals, clinics, datasets, etc.). A more in-depth video on how the platform works can be found here: https://videos.cern.ch/record/2299756

Since its start 1 year ago, with the EU project TRUSTroke (add link), the CAFEIN platform has been successfully delivered to the collaborating institutions. The project now starts the protected training of AI models for repeated stroke prevention, progression and risk management.

CAFEIN has furthermore progressed in its other collaborative project EPIC (the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition). This year the platform has already started to analyse initial data and develop algorithms, allowing for future inferring of breast cancer risks from 500’000 people’s lifestyle and dietary data.
The team behind CAFEIN is eager to push the technology further, expanding their international projects and deliverables each year. CAFEIN might just have something more up their sleeve this year, so follow along to not miss out.