Bitbox: A Cloud-based data sharing solution for medical images.

ABSTRACT

With the modernization and digitisation of the healthcare system, the need for exchanging medical data has become increasingly compelling. Biomedical imaging has been no exception, where the gathering of medical imaging acquisitions from multi-site collaborations have enabled to reach data sizes never imaginable until few years ago. Usually, medical imaging data have very large volume and diverse complexity, requiring bespoken transfer systems that protect personal information as well as data integrity. Despite many digital innovations, there are still technical and regulatory bottlenecks that make biomedical imaging data exchange challenging. Here we present Bitbox, a web-based application which provides a reliable yet straightforward service to securely exchange medical imaging data. With Bitbox, both imaging and non-imaging data of any type can be transferred from any external and independent site into a centralized server. A showcase of the system will be illustrated for the COVID-19 Clinical Neuroscience Study (COVID-CNS) project, a UK-wide experimental medicine study to investigate the neurological and neuropsychiatric effects of COVID-19 infections in hundreds of patients.