Infrastructure and User Services
A structured database that adheres to the FAIR principles is crucial for the quality of imaging studies. The research infrastructure (RI) combines the expertise of research software engineers and data managers to accomplish such a structured database.
The RI has expertise in development and validation of (AI) tools on large amounts of medical imaging data. With the help of experienced research software engineers, the RI can reuse these for new clinical applications.
Next to experience from day-to-day practice and all kinds of research projects, the RI gained specific experience from large population-based studies like Generation R and the Rotterdam Scan Study in the fields of imaging infrastructure and analysis pipelines.
The offered technologies and services can be roughly divided into three categories:
1. Digital image processing for clinical research (e.g. automatic tumor/organ segmentation, biomarkers, etc.)
2. Data services for using imaging data (e.g. anonymization, curation, storage, cataloguing, etc.)
3. Imaging software development
Examples/description of the type of research
The type of research that is mainly facilitated by the EPI2 research infrastructure is biomedical research. More specifically the services of this RI are very suitable for large (e.g. population-based cohort) studies to retrieve all kinds of advanced imaging biomarkers in a standardized way, and to enable the development and validation of medical image analysis methods using AI.
How to access the infrastructure?
Access can be provided for roughly three services:
- Data services (e.g. storage)
- Image analysis
- Software development
The medical image storage access (i.e. XNAT) is integrated in the national Health-RI XNAT instance (https://xnat.health-ri.nl). (Additional) support is offered from EPI2.
After the applicable agreements are in place (e.g. data transfer, data processing) an account will be created and a researcher is able to upload/download data. Via this way, the results of image analysis projects can also be accessed.
Imaging software (development) access follows a different route and is project-dependent.
