The medical world is sitting on a “gold mine” of research fodder in the form of billions of patient diagnostic images that could be used to learn more about diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, says the chair of the University of Toronto’s medical imaging department.
“Clinical images tend to be used just once, by a single clinician for a single patient, before being left to gather dust. This represents a squandering of resources,” argues Dr. Alan Moody in an essay in the medical journal Nature, released Monday.
Images from MRI and CT scans and x-rays, for example, which are taken to diagnose and treat patients, represent an untapped reservoir of information, said Moody, who also works as an imaging physician and senior scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
These images could provide researchers with a wealth of information about how diseases progress and whether there are subgroups of diseases, he said. And that, in turn, could help lead to discoveries about causes, treatments and cures.
“It’s cheap information because we have already acquired it,” Moody said in an interview.
As an example, Moody described how a vast pool of diagnostic images could help with research into Alzheimer’s disease.
Patients with symptoms of vague forgetfulness may get MRIs done during the early stages of what turns out to be dementia. Collecting a large number of such images from a large number of patients “would allow the small signal contained within the images, denoting early subclinical disease, to rise above the background noise,” Moody wrote.
Moody said that researchers could work together locally or even internationally to mine the data, and that patient privacy and consent issues would have to be addressed.
Dr. Andreas Laupacis, executive director of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital, said the idea has merit.
“I like it a lot,” said Laupacis, who is also former president of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, which already collects anonymized health information about Ontarians for research purposes through, for example, OHIP billings and hospital usage.
“I always bemoaned the fact we didn’t have the results of imaging tests,” Laupacis said, explaining that such information could help determine if tests were appropriately ordered.
Moody said that if his idea is ever adopted, it would require the creation of a new breed of image scientists, or “data prospectors.” It would also “require a user-friendly network in which to go trawling,” he said.