How is the PCIR different from other research image archival projects?
Some large multi-center collaborative research efforts are making the image collected during the clinical trials available in de-identified form. This is wonderful, and of tremendous benefit to the research and engineering community. Indeed, in our opinion, making one’s data available publicly and openly like this should be a pre-requisite for national funding. However, since only a small proportion of patients are actually enrolled in clinical trials (e.g., less than 5% of cancer patients is a number often quoted), and healthy normal patients are even less frequently involved, the PCIR provides an opportunity to gather information that might otherwise be “wasted”. Also, some such sites restrict access to “approved researchers”, and may place non-trivial obstacles in the path of others wanting to use the data. This is often a consequence of how the images are gathered in the first place, and the limited permission obtained from the imaging subjects initially. Experience with these site
