Image Database Could Lead to Research Revolution

Scientists led by the University of Dundee have built the Image Data Resource (IDR), a public database that collects and integrates imaging data related to experiments published in leading scientific journals. The collaboration, headed by Professor Jason Swedlow in the University’s School of Life Sciences involved colleagues in the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) at Dundee and groups at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). It brings together biologists, imaging specialists, big data scientists and computer scientists.

Professor Swedlow said: “Researchers collaborate with each other and keep abreast with research work from the global scientific community at meetings and in published papers, but the image datasets that underpin these communications are almost never published. As a result there is a huge amount of information that cannot be shared, accessed, compared or understood.

“IDR makes these datasets available, and allows scientists worldwide to combine, mine and analyse these imaging data. The potential to speed up research and link datasets so that scientists can look for patterns and commonalities is enormous. Even before officially announcing IDR, we’ve had contacts from cell biologists, drug discovery scientists and deep learning developers asking if they can use IDR.”

“Imaging will only be truly transformative for science if we make the data publicly available,” explains Alvis Brazma, a lead author and Senior Scientist at EMBL-EBI. “Scientists should be able to query existing data to identify commonalities and patterns. But to make this possible we need a robust platform where researchers can upload their imaging data and easily access data from other experiments. The Image Data Resource is the first step towards creating a public image data repository for the life sciences.”