IPM Take
The sharp signal is that personalised cardiology will not be unlocked by more datasets sitting in separate hospitals. It needs a way to make genomic, imaging, clinical and sensor data usable together without stripping out clinical context or exposing sensitive patient information. NextGen matters because it tackles the quiet infrastructure problem behind AI cardiology: before algorithms can personalise prevention or treatment, health data has to become interoperable, governed and usable across borders.
Executive Summary
On 10 April 2026, the European Society of Cardiology highlighted the EU NextGen project, which aims to advance personalised cardiology by integrating genomic, imaging and clinical data into AI models. The project is designed to combine genomic sequences, cardiac imaging and other data into secure multimodal integration objects. ESC describes this as a “digital fabric” that can support cardiovascular AI model training while keeping health data meaningful and readable across hospitals and borders, without moving or exposing sensitive patient information. CORDIS identifies NextGen as an EU-funded project focused on genome-centric multimodal data integration in personalised cardiovascular medicine.
Why it matters
- Data / AI leaders: Need interoperable and governed data infrastructure before cardiovascular AI can be trained and deployed responsibly.
- Researchers / academia: Could gain better ways to discover and use relevant cardiovascular datasets across sites without centralising sensitive data.
- Hospitals / providers: Need data systems that preserve clinical context, privacy and local governance while still supporting cross-site learning.
Previously, cardiovascular AI development often depended on datasets that were powerful but fragmented. Genomic data, imaging, clinical notes, wearable signals and sensor data could sit in different systems, under different rules and in formats that were difficult to combine.
What has changed is the focus on infrastructure. NextGen is not simply building another algorithm. It is trying to create the technical and governance layer that allows data to remain meaningful, discoverable and protected across systems. CORDIS describes project deliverables including tools for multimodal data integration, secure federated analytics, improved genomic data analysis, variant prioritisation, scalable genomic data curation and enhanced data management.
There is no direct patient eligibility criterion because this is an infrastructure programme. The affected groups are researchers, clinicians, hospitals and eventually patients whose care could benefit from more precise risk prediction, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment.
The implementation message is clear: AI-enabled cardiology will scale only if data systems are ready before the model is deployed. For IPM, NextGen is important because it points to the real bottleneck behind personalised cardiology. The issue is not only whether Europe has data. It is whether Europe can make data usable, governed and clinically meaningful across health systems.
