Welcome to the Patient Contributed Image Repository (PCIR)

The process is easy. All you need are images in digital form. To begin contributing immediately, read the agreement, then go to contribute now. If you need a little more background first, read this page and then proceed to the introduction for patients.

The purpose of the PCIR is to allow patients to directly contribute their own medical images to the public domain for re-use for research, software development and education.

Tremendous advances in medical imaging technology have occurred over the last few decades, both for diagnosis of patients and screening of healthy people at risk.

Many engineers, scientists, computer programmers and students have very limited access to medical images, particularly those working in other fields like astronomy, defense, geophysics and digital photography. These people could contribute to the field of medical image processing research by "translating" their expertise, if only they had access to image data. Unfortunately, the ordinary mechanisms of funding and approval are limited and burdensome. Even companies building medical imaging products are limited in their access to images. It is hard for them to gain access to their competitors' images and thus to improve interoperability.

Most medical images, however, are not "re-used" beyond their original purpose. Whether they are normal or abnormal, or turn out to be helpful in diagnosing or detecting disease or not, ultimately the images are discarded, or archived but not accessible.

That is where you can help!

By contributing your own images to the public domain via the PCIR, you can enable these imaginative people to develop better tools and better products and advance the state of the art. The PCIR will distribute your images via the Internet to everyone who needs them.

Your privacy is our highest priority!

Your identifying information will be removed from any images or files that you contribute to the PCIR before they are made publicly available.