MIDRC has been awarded a generous grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, to fuel the development of MIDRC-Global, an international initiative aimed at expanding the MIDRC data commons to transform medical imaging research on a global scale.  

MIDRC-Global will work with collaborators from Kenya (Dr. Loice Jeruto Sitienei and team) and Ghana (Dr. Jane Afriyie-Mensah and team) to collect medical imaging data from different regions in Africa, to expand MIDRC’s data commons.

This effort will focus on increasing representative, annotated imaging data available to support AI/ML, focusing on lung fibrosis as presented on chest radiographs and lung CT’s, helping doctors and researchers develop better tools for diagnosis and treatment for all patients.

This funding will directly support:

• Expansion of data collection efforts globally, to create a more comprehensive resource for researchers.

• Enhancing data organization and processing, making it easier to use for AI development.

• Enhancements to the MIDRC user portal, enabling broader access and collaboration for AI researchers worldwide.

By enriching MIDRC’s AI-ready publicly available data commons with high-quality medical imaging datasets from across the globe, AI researchers will have unprecedented opportunities to improve the reliability, accuracy, and applicability of machine learning algorithms. Importantly, this initiative will also ultimately help overcome a critical challenge in AI-driven medical imaging—the scarcity of well-annotated data in rare diseases.

Through open-access resources and innovative data-sharing mechanisms, MIDRC-Global is poised to drive groundbreaking advancements in AI-powered medical research, fostering new discoveries that will positively impact the diagnosis and prognosis of disease across the global population.

MIDRC-Global is expected to enhance representation, facilitate access to datasets from a wide range of populations, and raise awareness of the importance of comprehensive data and AI models that benefit everyone.

MIDRC Global is funded by grant 2024-354607 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Donor Advised Fund (DAF), an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.