The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center released over 100,000 anonymous chest x-ray images and associated data to the national scientific community. These images were made available for artificial intelligence and machine learning purposes.
Taking Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) into consideration, NIH personnel screened the scans from more than 30,000 patients, including many with advanced lung disease, to ensure privacy.
“By using this free dataset, the hope is that academic and research institutions across the country will be able to teach a computer to read and process extremely large amounts of scans, to confirm the results radiologists have found and potentially identify other findings that may have been overlooked,” said the NIH, in a released statement.
The NIH is also foresees issuing a large dataset of CT scans in the coming months.
As a senior news writer for TriMed, Subrata covers cardiology, clinical innovation and healthcare business. She has a master’s degree in communication management and 12 years of experience in journalism and public relations.