SYNTHIA: synthetic data generation framework for healthcare applications

SYNTHIA is a collaborative project between public and private partners, funded by the Innovative Health Initiative. The consortium aims at promoting the responsible use of Synthetic Data in healthcare research and innovation.

SD are artificially generated for mimicking real clinical data, train AI algorithms for biomedical research, while protecting the privacy of real patients. They offer a promising way to overcome challenges like limited access to high-quality clinical dataset and regulatory constraints. The project aims at delivering validated, reliable tools and methods for synthetic data generation.

A key outcome will be SYNTHIA’s online platform, which will offer researchers and clinicians open access to validated synthetic datasets, and SD generation workflows. The platform will also include evaluation tools to test the generated synthetic data for privacy (to avoid risk of re-identification), quality (representativeness and similarity to real data), and applicability (i.e. its suitability for its intended use).