MIDRC-COVID Initiative

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) funded an image-based COVID initiative called the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC). This initiative is co-led by the ACR, the RSNA, and the AAPM. It’s hosted at the University of Chicago and involves multi-institutional collaboration with more than 20 institutions from coast-to-coast. The goal is to accelerate machine learning research facilitated by a high-quality COVID-image commons linked to relevant clinical data.  The data will be made available as a public resource.

To ensure success, MIDRC encourages all institutions and hospitals to donate their COVID data to the cause and provides a mechanism to securely submit the imaging data and the clinical metadata. The initial influx of imaging data is pulmonary (chest radiographs and chest CTs) but the longer-term goal is to collect COVID-related imaging exams from other body regions.

As you’re aware, the neuroimaging manifestations of COVID-19 are less well studied. Our goal is to capture as many of these examples as possible, especially since there are fewer neuroimaging studies of COVID per site compared to the pulmonary manifestations. It is therefore essential to engage with many sites and to aggregate a large cohort that enhances the research potential of the data commons.

ASNR believes its members can be an imperative resource for this initiative and encourages you to participate with your institutions and practices. If you are interested in participating, please visit the MIDRC data contribution page for further information. Institutional data sharing and data use agreements are under development.

This is an extremely important project to the imaging and medical community at large. ASNR believes that broad participation will assure this initiative is successful and will bring this valuable resource to fruition both for our members and for the general public.