Key medical imaging associations are working together to develop the new Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC), an open-source database with medical images from tens of thousands of coronavirus (COVID-19) patients. The MIDRC will help doctors better understand, diagnose, monitor and treat COVID-19.
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding the effort through a contract to Dr. Maryellen Giger of the University of Chicago, which will host the MIDRC.
The MIDRC effort is co-led by the three medical imaging associations with Etta Pisano and Michael Tilkin from the American College of Radiology® (ACR®); Curtis Langlotz and Adam Flanders representing the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA); and Maryellen Giger and Paul Kinahan representing the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).
Medical imaging helps radiologists detect, diagnose and monitor disease. However, many unanswered questions remain about how imaging could be deployed against COVID-19. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms could help radiologists better prioritise and analyse scans. But thousands of images must be collected and annotated to train these algorithms. The MIDRC will bring together engineers, physicians and scientists to collect and organise the data to answer these crucial questions.
Funded under the National Institutes of Health’s special emergency COVID-19 process, the MIDRC will create an open access platform to collect, annotate, store and share COVID-related medical images.
The MIDRC will soon leverage existing data collection efforts to upload more than 10,000 COVID-19 thoracic radiographs and CT images, including many from the ACR COVID-19 Imaging Research Registry and the RSNA International COVID-19 Open Radiology Database (RICORD). This will allow researchers worldwide to access a wealth of images and clinical data to answer COVID-19 clinical and logistical questions.
The MIDRC will include five infrastructure development projects and oversee twelve research projects, including approximately 20 university labs, in support of solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. The MIDRC will initially focus on COVID-19 but will work to expand services to provide imaging data and AI pipelines to aid the fight against other diseases.
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