What is Bigpicture?

Bigpicture is a European infrastructure for digital pathology research and artificial intelligence, connecting pathology data with the standards, technology and governance needed to use it across organizations. Built through collaboration across healthcare, academia, industry and technology, it enables researchers to work with pathology data beyond individual collections and systems.

Building what no organization can build alone

Robust digital pathology research and AI require access to large, diverse and well-described datasets. Much of this data remains fragmented across organizations and difficult to use at scale. Bigpicture provides the shared infrastructure needed to make these collections more accessible and usable across Europe.

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.