The American College of Radiology® (ACR®) continues to engage with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) regarding potential partnerships with ACR-collaborative, managed, led or sponsored research entities and programs to address the nation’s greatest healthcare challenges.
ARPA-H recently announced that the ACR co-led Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC) will provide domain expertise and database technology development in medical imaging to the ARPA-H Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox. The BDF is an initiative to de-risk technologies for an easily deployable, multi-modal, multi-scale connected data ecosystem for biomedical data.
MIDRC is co-led by investigators from the ACR, American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the Radiological Society of North America. Funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, MIDRC is hosted at the University of Chicago and exists on the Gen3 data ecosystem.
As one of the two MIDRC data contribution pathways, the ACR COVID-19 Imaging Research Registry™ (CIRR) established a growing network of sites that, to date, have ingested, curated and transferred more than 84,000 imaging studies and data from 37,000 patients to MIDRC to help researchers develop machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for COVID-19 care.
The ACR also supported MIDRC goals to develop collaborations with other organizations by establishing partnerships with the Society for Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) VIRUS project, as well as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)-sponsored PETAL Network (RED and BLUE CORAL trials), to transfer more than 10,000 COVID-19 imaging studies to ACR for processing and ultimately contribution to MIDRC.
ARPA-H is enlisting multiple “performers” — including MIDRC — who are experts in their fields, to build components of the BDF Toolbox. MIDRC’s expertise stems from developing the repository in which MIDRC imaging data are harmonized and vetted by clinical, AI/ML and data science domain experts and are aligned with a common data model.
The ARPA-H BDF Toolbox, in which MIDRC will now take part, 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.
Click here to find out how you can submit data to and/or access data from MIDRC.
Click here for more information on how you can get involved in the ARPA-H BDF.