On 6 and 7 May 2024, the PrivateAIM Workshop took place at the Albertina Library of Leipzig University, where the first version of the newly developed software platform “FLAME” of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) was presented.

FLAME, short for “Federated Learning and Analyses in Medicine”, enables the cross-site analysis of medical data in compliance with current data protection regulations. The sensitive patient data remains in the clinics, i.e. the analysis comes to the data, not the other way round.

The following topics were presented and discussed in the workshop on the first day:

• The development team – Peter Placzek, David Hieber, Alexander Röhl (both from Tübingen University Hospital), Maximilian Jugl, Alexander Twrdik (both from Leipzig University Hospital) as well as Mehrshad Jaberansary and Bruce Schultz (both from Cologne University Hospital) – presented the architecture, components and interfaces of FLAME as well as a live demo of the software at the workshop.
• The system requirements for commissioning at the medical data integration centres (DIZ) were also explained.
• Cem Ata Baykara (from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen) presented a new coding model for distributed medical analyses that could be applied to FLAME: Age determination analysis based on the degree of methylation of DNA by machine learning.
• Subsequently, topics such as the FLAME Python Software Development Kit (SDK), the client node setup and installation, use cases for medical analyses in FLAME and the integration of FLAME into the DIZ were discussed in working groups.

On the second day of the workshop:

• Atanas Aleksandrov (from the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg) gave a detailed presentation on three specific use cases of medical analyses that can be performed with FLAME based on established encryption technologies:
  
  • Gene expression and phenotype studies,
  • genome-wide association studies and
  • multimodal studies (genome, phenome, imaging).

It is planned to roll out FLAME at the DIZ in Leipzig, Berlin, Erlangen and Tübingen in autumn this year.

More information about PrivateAIM: https://bit.ly/4dKEhGk