An Australian Imaging Service: Melding the Clinical and Academic using a Distributed Federation of Enhanced XNATs

Universities and clinical sites across Australia struggle to manage large volumes of imaging data, balancing patient privacy and the need for sharing and accessibility in the research community. In the past 2 years, there has been rapid adoption of XNAT, a data management and informatics platform for imaging research. This critical mass uptake provides the opportunity to collectively align our work and transform the imaging and radiology sector, and thus this project seeks to create an Australian Imaging Service, by leveraging these institutional investments. Building upon work on reproducibility in the Trusted Data Repository project, on patient privacy in the ARDC Discovery Activities, and accessibility from the creation of the Australian Access Federation plugin, the University of Sydney in partnership with Queensland University of Technology, the University of Queensland, Monash University, the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, the University of Wollongong, the University of Western Australia and the Australian National University, propose a 2-year project to standardize and integrate deployments of the XNAT platform to create a distributed federation of enhanced XNATs. This is a unique opportunity for the sector, as it is not often that so many institutions can come to an agreement on a single technical implementation for the benefit of not only their own institution, but also many more institutions and clinical sites in the future. Our innovative federation will consist of multiple institutional deployments linked with a federated metadata search layer, common community practice, expanded data modalities, and a Trusted Tool Repository ensuring ongoing ownership and accountability of data. By integrating direct data captured from instruments, data
in clinical sites, and by using containerized pipelines on both local High Performance Computers and cloud, we will create a novel and innovative end to end Australian Imaging Service platform accessible by a single sign-on through the Australian Access Federation, that is both feasible and solves significant and urgent data challenges for Australian researchers.