PICTURES

Overview

PICTURES (InterdisciPlInary Collaboration for efficienT and effective Use of clinical images in big data healthcare RESearch) was a 5-year MRC funded programme of work to enable international research access to highly heterogeneous, routinely collected, clinical images linked to patient outcomes.

In 2022, the PICTURES team delivered the Scottish Medical Imaging (SMI) capability, providing safe and secure resources for health data research involving population-level real-world medical image data, that meets both the needs of researchers and strict data governance requirements.

HIC's role

• Prof Emily Jefferson, HIC Director at the time, drove development of the MRC bid and was Principal Investigator for the £2.8m PICTURES Grant.
• Various work packages were led by HIC staff and their Senior Project Manager led delivery of the programme as a whole.
• HIC developed the Research Data Management Platform (RDMP), an integral component of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) technology upon which SMI was built.
• HIC hosted one of the two exemplar projects, demonstrating portability of SMI outputs and enabling the development of a machine-learning pipeline for predicting future dementia diagnoses using routinely acquired MRI brain scans linked with medical records for Tayside and Fife patients from the consented SHARE cohort.

Impact

• Researchers now have access to over 1.5 petabytes of research-ready medical imaging data for the whole of Scotland, linked to electronic health records, through SMI in the Scottish National Safe Haven.
• HIC are at the forefront of enabling image-based research at a regional level, working with data controllers to provision routinely collected image data from NHS Tayside’s Picture Archive and Communications System (PACS) within the East of Scotland Safe Haven hosted and managed by HIC.
• The PICTURES programme of work led to related funding and projects like GRAIMatter, SACRO and SDC-Reboot. These initiatives focused on enabling safe egress of models trained on data intended to remain within a controlled environment, which is an essential step toward getting research outputs into real-world clinical settings for patient benefit.