What is Bigpicture?

Bigpicture brings pathology data, technology, standards, governance and expertise together in a shared European infrastructure for research and artificial intelligence. Built through collaboration across healthcare, academia, industry and technology, Bigpicture makes it possible to work with pathology data across organizations rather than within isolated collections and systems.

Building what no organization can build alone

Digital pathology creates new opportunities to improve diagnostics, advance biomedical research and support the development of new therapies. Artificial intelligence can play an important role in this transformation, but developing and validating robust AI requires access to large, diverse and well-described pathology datasets. Much of this data is distributed across hospitals, research institutes and companies, collected for different purposes and stored and described in different ways. This makes it difficult to combine and use data at the scale needed for research and AI development.

Bigpicture addresses this challenge collectively. By bringing data, standards, technology, governance and expertise together, it creates a shared resource that individual organizations would be difficult to build alone.

More than a repository

At the center of Bigpicture is a growing repository of digital pathology images and associated metadata. But Bigpicture is more than a place to store data. The Bigpicture Platform combines the Repository with the standards, tools, workflows and governance needed to make pathology data accessible and usable across organizations.

Explore the Bigpicture Platform

Clinical and non-clinical pathology

Bigpicture brings together both clinical and non-clinical pathology data. Clinical pathology data can support research into human disease, diagnostics and the development and validation of AI. Non-clinical pathology data plays an important role in biomedical and pharmaceutical research, including drug development and research aimed at replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals. Bringing these different types of pathology data into a shared infrastructure increases the diversity of data available and broadens the research Bigpicture can support.

A European initiative built together

Bigpicture was launched as a public-private research initiative funded through the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (IMI2 JU), with support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and EFPIA. The current project is laying the foundations for Bigpicture’s longer-term role as a shared European infrastructure for digital pathology.