UChicago News: The Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC), hosted at the University of Chicago, has been selected to participate in a new pilot program from the NSF to democratize AI research.

The National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot will gather 10 federal agencies and 25 private sector, nonprofit, and philanthropic organizations to build a shared research infrastructure that will strengthen access to critical resources necessary to power responsible AI discovery and innovation. The project will provide access to advanced computing, datasets, models, software, training, and user support to U.S.-based researchers and educators and, as it continues to grow, will inform the design of a national AI ecosystem.

“The overall goal of MIDRC is to support the medical imaging AI ecosystem. We’ve built the infrastructure to house, curate, and organize medical images, we’ve collected a huge amount of real-world imaging data, and we’ve put forth a concerted effort to educate users about the development of algorithms and potential sources of bias,” said Maryellen L. Giger, PhD, the A.N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor of Radiology at UChicago and MIDRC principal investigator. “The collaborations and infrastructure that have been established provide a solid foundation for the creation of more medical imaging datasets and the development of AI algorithms for all sorts of use cases through this new NAIRR pilot program.”

The launch of MIDRC was spurred by the 2020 C3.ai DTI COVID-19 research of Principal Investigator Maryellen Giger of UChicago, for the project, “Medical Imaging Domain-Expertise Machine Learning for Interrogation of COVID.”

Read the full story: “MIDRC selected for program to build national AI research infrastructure.”