MIDRC has received a Distinguished Achievement Award in the 2023 DataWorks! Prize. The prize is a partnership between the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) to incentivize effective practices and increase community engagement around data sharing and reuse. MIDRC was recognized for its collaboration to create a curated, diverse commons for medical imaging AI research and translation. All of MIDRC’s procedures, data models, data harmonization, annotation, and data management strategies are publicly available.

MIDRC was selected in September 2023 as one of several performers for the ARPA-H Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox. The ARPA-H BDF is an initiative to de-risk technologies for an easily deployable, multi-modal, multi-scale, connected data ecosystem for biomedical data. MIDRC will provide domain expertise and data commons technology development in medical imaging.  MIDRC is funded by NIH NIBIB, co-led by investigators from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and the American College of Radiology (ACR), hosted at the University of Chicago (MIDRC Central), and exists on the Gen3 data ecosystem.

ARPA-H is enlisting multiple performers who are experts in their fields to build components of the ARPA-H BDF Toolbox. MIDRC’s expertise stems from developing the repository in which MIDRC imaging data are harmonized and vetted by clinical, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), and data science domain experts and are aligned with a common data model. The public open data commons was created “at scale” and is interoperable with other data commons to enable multi-modal, multi-omics research as well as rigorous statistical evaluations.  MIDRC also includes a user portal for cohort building and downloading, allowing for multiple re-uses of the data by various AI/ML developers for various specific tasks.  Importantly, MIDRC has also produced various resources such as a metrology decision tree and a bias awareness tool for aiding in bias mitigation as well as multiple algorithms/software.

The ARPA-H BDF toolbox will help make research data easier and more reliable to use, reduce effort for data integration, and enable new capabilities and models that can be applied across disciplines and generalized across disease domains. “MIDRC’s involvement in the ARPA-H BDF Toolbox will include development and deployment of medical imaging data commons architectures and resources to support various diseases and applications for the toolbox.” said MIDRC principal investigator Maryellen L. Giger, PhD, the A.N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor of Radiology, Committee on Medical Physics at the University of Chicago.

For more on how you can get involved, go to ARPA-H BDF; for more on how you can submit and/or access data, go to MIDRC.

MIDRC and NIBIB are hosting a workshop to review the history of MIDRC and its impact on medical imaging and trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) development, and to look forward to the future of MIDRC and AI.

Date: April 26, 2024

Time: 9:00 AM to 12 PM EDT

Location: NIH main campus in Bethesda, MD and virtually by Zoom

Register here.

Find publications on the MIDRC website.

• International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE)
• America Society for Neuroradiology (ASNR)
• American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM)
• Academy for Radiology and Biomedical Imaging Research
• Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM)

• >300,000 imaging studies collected 
• >135,000 imaging studies released to the public
• 27 algorithms in development
• >450 data users