ImageSfERe: Image sharing for epilepsy research

摘要

Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) is the leading mode of epilepsy-related death and is most common in patients with intractable, frequent, and continuing seizures. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and other neuroimaging techniques create an important data source for investigators to collaborate and share a larger cohort of potential SUDEP patient data. To address the challenges of sharing neuroimaging data across institutions with good semantic precision, we developed ImageSfERe, a web-based image sharing module for Epilepsy Research. Since various aspects of patient information need to be harmonized and integrated, a dedicated questionnaire consisting of 248 questions about patient background information is incorporated into ImageSfERe. Eight repositories of patient de-identified images in Digital Image and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format, over 23 GB of data, have been successfully processed and made available via ImageSfERe. To enable interoperability, we also adapted epilepsy neuroimaging common data elements from the National Institute of Health (NIH).