Ethical and Privacy Aspects of Using Medical Image Data

This chapter describes the ethical and privacy aspects of using medical data in the context of the VISCERAL project. The project had as main goals the creation of a benchmark for organ segmentation, landmark detection, lesion detection and similar case retrieval. The availability of a large amount of imaging data was extremely important for the project goals, and thus, we present an analysis of the procedures that were followed for getting access to the data from IRB (internal review board) approval to data extraction and usage. This chapter details the requirements stated by medical ethics committees in three partner countries that supplied data. The exact procedure from request to data distribution is explained. The specific requirements of each data provider (each from a different country) are described in detail. The final data collection was made available in anonymized form in the Microsoft Azure cloud with the restriction of having it on servers that are located inside the European Union.