European Commission Recruits Hospitals for EU Network of AI-Powered Cancer and Cardiovascular Screening Centres

The European Commission has invited hospitals and clinics across the EU to join a network of AI-Powered Advanced Screening Centres, a flagship of its Apply AI Strategy aimed first at early detection and diagnosis of cancer and cardiovascular disease. The call for expressions of interest closes on 10 April 2026, and the network aims to cover all member states by the end of 2029. It is the Commission's largest coordinated attempt so far to move AI-assisted diagnostics from pilots into structured clinical use. The need is large: the Joint Research Centre estimated 2.7 million new cancer cases in the EU in 2024, cancer causes roughly a quarter of deaths, and cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death and disability, with outcomes varying by region, gender and income. Clinical AI has so far struggled to spread beyond well-resourced academic centres. The network is designed as a federated system in which enrolled hospitals act as nodes in collaborative multi-centre studies that validate AI tools on real patients. Centres that are not yet technically ready can join as observers if they commit to reaching minimum readiness by 2028. The data foundation is the European Health Data Space, in force since 2025, which provides secure, interoperable access to health data for training, testing and evaluating models. Cancer imaging studies will use the Cancer Image Europe platform as their main repository, and cardiovascular work will build on the EU4Health Cardiovascular Flagship for cross-border data sharing. A parallel initiative, COMPASS-AI, launched in October 2025, brings together experts to turn the network's evidence into deployment guidelines and to raise AI literacy among clinicians and hospital managers. Participating hospitals get early access to research outputs, training in AI validation and ethics, and designation as EU reference sites. The timeline is meant to line up with full application of the EU AI Act in August 2027, which classes many clinical decision-support tools as high-risk systems. The Apply AI Strategy, published in October 2025, mobilizes about €1 billion across sectors, and the screening network draws on several EU programmes rather than a single budget line.