Scottish Medical Imaging Service
16 May 2022
Each year millions of clinical images such as X-rays, CT, MRI, ultrasound, and nuclear medicine images are generated in the NHS in Scotland and stored in the national Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS).
While such images contain important clinical information they also contain a great deal of potential information about the health of the individual which is currently not made use of in health care.
The Scottish Medical Imaging (SMI) Service is part of the electronic Data Research and Innovation Service (eDRIS) team within Public Health Scotland. Working in partnership with the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the University of Dundee, and EPCC on an MRC-funded programme grant, “PICTURES”, we have developed and tested the tools to collate, de-identify, and build cohorts from medical images collected for routine healthcare.
This new national resource, which launched in April 2022, will be used to provision pseudonymised images and associated report data to researchers which, if required, may be linked to other available pseudonymised datasets.
The aim of the Scottish Medical Imaging (SMI) service is to provide linkable, population based, “research-ready” real-world medical images for researchers to develop or validate AI algorithms within the Scottish National Safe Haven.
The SMI Service has been created to declutter imaging data access in Scotland by providing a single user journey, regardless of the type of imaging data being requested. It will provide information about the imaging data landscape and how to access the data, what timescales are likely to be encountered, and the information that a researcher needs to provide to gain access to the data sets. With this, SMI is able to guide researchers through the data access journey, offering advice where needed, to make the process as seamless and effective as possible.
The SMI database has been created from a copy of the national Picture Archiving and Communication System dataset, to be held in the National Safe Haven. This is located at EPCC’s Advanced Computing Facility.
Further information
Contact the eDRIS team: phs.edris@phs.scot
Website: www.isdscotland.org/Products-and-Services/eDRIS/Scottish-Medical-Imaging-Service/
Author
Jackie Caldwell, SMI Strategic Lead
Jackie.Caldwell3@phs.scot