Large-Scale Standardized Image Integration for Secondary Use Research Projects

Abstract

Imaging techniques are a cornerstone of today’s medicine and can be crucial for a successful therapy. But in addition, the generated imaging series are an important resource for new informatics’ methods, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. This paper describes the success of integrating clinical routine imaging data into a standardized format for research purposes. Thus, we designed an integration flow and successfully implemented it in the local data integration center of University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein. The flow integrates imaging series and radiological reports from the primary system into an openEHR repository with enrichment by semantic codes for better findability and retrieval using HL7 FHIR. As a result, 6.6 million radiological studies with 29 million image series are now available for further medical (informatics) research.