The Open Source Imaging Consortium (OSIC) launched a global repository of anonymized high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) scans and clinical information about interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).
“Building the OSIC repository has been a collaboration in its truest sense, with people from different disciplines, organizations, and countries all coming together on behalf of patients everywhere,” Kevin Brown, MD, the pulmonology lead at OSIC, said. “This ability to collect and organize anonymized imaging and clinical data from across the world is the future of clinical science.”
The database is the world’s largest and most diverse, and it contains real-world clinical and imaging data from 1500 anonymized and quality-controlled scans with accompanying data. An additional 5000 scans are waiting to pass the quality control to be included in the database. The aim is to make 15,000 anonymized scans available to OSIC members by the first quarter of 2022.
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“As the OSIC database grows and we continuously learn from it, a real and substantial improvement in our ability to diagnose early, to predict outcomes, and to measure responses to therapy will be the result,” Dr. Brown said.
Medical imaging analysis has advanced rapidly in recent years, “but a major obstacle to harnessing this technology . . . is the lack of large diverse imaging repositories needed for computer training,” said Simon Walsh, MD, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London and the radiology lead of OSIC.
“OSIC addresses this unmet need by providing researchers with the data needed to develop [artificial intelligence]-based applications for improving patient care and facilitating precision medicine,” Dr. Walsh said. “Being able to reliably predict how pulmonary fibrosis will progress in an individual patient would allow doctors to initiate appropriate treatment at the earliest opportunity and slow disease progression.”
Reference
First-of-its-kind, global data repository for interstitial lung diseases launches through academic and industry collaborative. News release. Open Source Imaging Consortium; September 7, 2021.
