MIDRC is a multi-institutional collaborative initiative driven by the medical imaging community that was initiated in late summer 2020 to help combat the global COVID-19 health emergency. MIDRC is aimed at accelerating the transfer of knowledge and innovation in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. MIDRC, funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and hosted at the University of Chicago, is co-led by the American College of Radiology® (ACR®), the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). The aim of MIDRC is to foster machine learning innovation through data sharing for rapid and flexible collection, analysis, and dissemination of imaging and associated clinical data by providing researchers with unparalleled resources.

Leveraging the existing and developing infrastructure provided by the participating organizations, MIDRC serves as a linked-data commons that coordinates access to data and harmonizes data management activities at three critical stages: (1) intake, including curation, de-identification, abstraction, and quality assessment, (2) annotation and labelling of images and other data using semi-automated approaches, and (3) distributed access and query methods.  MIDRC receives medical images and associated metadata through intake portals at the RSNA and ACR, and then, through a Data Commons Portal on the Gen3 Data Ecosystem, enables a single public access point for data discovery. The MIDRC collection is linked through secure services and a common query infrastructure and allows additional data sources to be incorporated over time. The imaging data is being collected from multiple sources including academic medical centers, community hospitals, and others, and the resources offered by MIDRC are open to registered users according to the data use agreement.