The Back-UP Research Platform builds on previous EC investment to create MULTI-X (www.multi-x.org), an “AI data and software-as-a-service” middleware platform developed through large, multidisciplinary European collaborations (@neurIST, MySpine, VPH-Share, VPH-DARE@IT and Back-UP). At this stage of the development, we seek collaboration opportunities to promote MULTI-X into a broadly adopted, academically-driven AI platform streamlining collaboration across healthcare, academic and industrial sectors and support the co-development of next-generation healthcare AI solutions.

The Back-UP Research Platform has demonstrated the technical requirements to integrate, process and exploit multidisciplinary data, tools and models provided by different partners. Reproducible demonstrators of computational pipelines, their orchestration in cloud resources, and the interactive visualisation of the outcomes are now available in the platform for testing and reviewing. Furthermore, the exploitation of models available in the Back-UP Platform from external services has been tested through the Back-UP First Contact web app and the integration with Antari Professional Care.

To promote the adoption of MULTI-X in healthcare environments the next stage of the development will be focused on obtaining accredited certification to the international standard for Information Security Management, ISO 27001:2013, and GDPR and data protection certification.

In order to reach the extreme-scale levels in data processing, analytic platforms are required to coordinate a large number of concurrent service requests and automatically provide resources to satisfy the computational demands. MULTI-X provides a highly configurable execution engine for leveraging both cloud computing and on-premise resources. Different processing mechanisms, including serialised and parallelised executions on local, distributed, or load-balanced dynamically-generated computing clusters can be configured to cope with varying workloads.

MULTI-X is a cross-domain research-oriented platform designed for collaborative and reproducible science. It has been used to support multiple research domains and healthcare disciplines (e.g., orthopaedics, cardiology, neurology and angiology) and can be easily adapted to support other fields. It provides a general-purpose, scalable, and integrative computational framework. It was designed to foster the development, integration, and testing of scientific tools, facilitating their connection with large-scale federated data repositories and providing analysis tools to get immediate insights about the data processed.

As technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, big data analysis, and biomarker discovery evolve, it is essential to provide easy to use, time-saving solutions to make them accessible to researchers and developers. The rapid and extensive development of AI applied to healthcare and life sciences allows us to envision a landscape where experiments of unparalleled size and complexity can be conducted using shared computing environments. MULTI-X offers a comprehensive solution for the technology needs of this sector. It provides an ecosystem where providers and consumers of datasets, tools, models and infrastructures can securely collaborate on multiple research fields. To ensure long-term sustainability, a managed service model and fair associated costing policy have been developed. The collaborative model and possible sources of income and opportunities for external investment are assessed in more detail in a business case analysis.