Bringing together experts from the medical sector

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is launching a collaboration center dedicated to developing new AI-based tools to fight the coronavirus.

The Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center, led by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) part of NIH, will focus on detection and personalized therapies for COVID-19.

The multi-institutional collaboration includes the American College of Radiology (ACR), the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

Pooling resources

“This program is particularly exciting because it will give us new ways to rapidly turn scientific findings into practical imaging tools that benefit COVID-19 patients,” said Bruce J. Tromberg, director of NIBIB. “It unites leaders in medical imaging and artificial intelligence from academia, professional societies, industry, and government to take on this important challenge.”

The resource center is expected to facilitate rapid and flexible collection, analysis, and dissemination of imaging and clinical data.

The project is targeting the major challenge of rapidly and accurately identifying the features of infected lungs and hearts from medical images, which can help assess disease severity and predict responses to treatment.

“This effort will gather a large repository of COVID-19 chest images, allowing researchers to evaluate both lung and cardiac tissue data, ask critical research questions, and develop predictive COVID-19 imaging signatures that can be delivered to healthcare providers,” Guoying Liu, the NIBIB scientific program lead on the collaboration, said.

The approaches being developed at the center could eventually benefit other conditions.