Obtaining CT/MRI scans for Research purposes

[sjuliani]

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Hello everyone,
I'm a research student from MTSU. I'm conducting research in tomographical reconstruction for a variety of uses(X-ray, MRI, Cat, SPEC,etc..). At the moment we are concentrating in a more accurate method in visualizing a geometric patient model for cancer therapy. At the moment we only have a few CT scans and MRI images that were donated.We are looking for more samples for our research.
I should mention that we are looking for RAW data in either ACR-NEMA or DICOM format with no patient personal information.
I have attached a sample of a brain-to-brain mapping done by our software (normal brain comparison with that of a MS patient)
Please feel free to email me at [email protected] (Julian Harbehband) or [email protected] (Dr. Anatoliy Volkov)
http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc183/Farvardeen/Research/brain-brain.jpg

 

[quietude]

Hello everyone,
I'm a research student from MTSU. I'm conducting research in tomographical reconstruction for a variety of uses(X-ray, MRI, Cat, SPEC,etc..). At the moment we are concentrating in a more accurate method in visualizing a geometric patient model for cancer therapy. At the moment we only have a few CT scans and MRI images that were donated.We are looking for more samples for our research.
I should mention that we are looking for RAW data in either ACR-NEMA or DICOM format with no patient personal information.
I have attached a sample of a brain-to-brain mapping done by our software (normal brain comparison with that of a MS patient)
Please feel free to email me at [email protected] (Julian Harbehband) or [email protected] (Dr. Anatoliy Volkov)
http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc183/Farvardeen/Research/brain-brain.jpg

Wouldn't release of this information for research by another institution, even stripped of patient identifiers, need IRB approval by the home institution of anyone who donated? Do you have this approval through MTSU as well?

Or does some sort of fair use analogy hold? I've never been able to access this kind of information for research without a HIPAA release form from the patient and/or IRB approval. However, most of my research has not been imaging-related at this point, and I'm unclear whether or not you could argue that an medical image without text identifiers is still unique enough to count as protected under HIPAA.

 

[sjuliani]

I don't believe it should be a problem since for example all the donated data we received were simply labeled "MS patient" with no other information attached; however, I'm pretty sure that the data had to be approved by the institution's IRB before being donated.
All we are looking for are institutions that are willing to donate such data for research purposes to a legitimate university.