NIH Launches AI, Medical Imaging Center to Combat COVID-19

August 07, 2020 - NIH has launched the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC), which will utilize artificial intelligence and medical imaging to enhance COVID-19 detection and treatment.

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The multi-institutional collaboration will be led by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), and will work to create new tools that physicians can use for personalized therapies for COVID-19 patients.

“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, PhD, NIBIB Director. “It unites leaders in medical imaging and artificial intelligence from academia, professional societies, industry, and government to take on this important challenge.”

The features of infected hearts and lungs seen on medical images can help providers assess disease severity, predict treatment response, and improve patient outcomes. However, rapidly and accurately identifying these signatures and evaluating this information in combination with other clinical symptoms and tests is a major challenge.

MIDRC will aim to lead the development and implementation of new diagnostics, including machine learning algorithms, that will enable the rapid and accurate assessment of disease status and help clinicians optimize patient treatments.

“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,” said Guoying Liu, PhD, the NIBIB scientific program lead on this project.

The new center will facilitate the rapid and flexible collection, analysis, and dissemination of imaging and associated clinical data. Participating organizations will provide expertise in medical imaging, as well as dedication to imaging data quality, security, access, and sustainability.

“This major initiative responds to the international imaging community’s expressed unmet need for a secure technological network to enable the development and ethical application of artificial intelligence to make the best medical decisions for COVID-19 patients,” said Krishna Kandarpa, MD, PhD, director of research sciences and strategic directions at NIBIB. “Eventually, the approaches developed could benefit other conditions as well.”

MIDRC will add to NIH’s efforts to combat COVID-19. The organization recently launched a COVID-19 analytics platform that aims to provide a centralized, secure enclave to analyze patients’ medical data.

Part of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), the study will combine information into a standardized format and make it available for researchers and healthcare providers to find effective treatments.

N3C aims to transform clinical information needed to identify health risk factors that indicate better or worse outcomes of COVID-19.

“The N3C was founded on the principle that because no one institution has that much data – especially some of the states that have fortunately lower incidence rate for COVID – if we could aggregate and harmonize our data, then we could develop tools like machine learning models and sophisticated statistics,” Melissa Haendel, PhD, associate professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology in the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine, told HealthITAnalytics.  

“By doing this, we could have enough data to reveal patterns that wouldn't otherwise be revealed within a single institution.”