An Open-Source Digital Archiving System for Medical and Scientific Research

Abstract

In this paper, we present MIDAS, an open-source web-based digital archiving system that handles large collections of scientific data. We created a web-based digital archiving repository based on open standards. The MIDAS repository is specifically tuned for medical and scientific datasets and provides a flexible data management facility, a search engine, and an online image viewer. MIDAS allows researchers to store, manage and share scientific datasets, from the convenience of a web browser or through a generic programming interface, thereby facilitating the dissemination of valuable imaging datasets to research collaborators. The system is currently deployed at several research laboratories worldwide and has demonstrated its ability to streamline the full scientific processing workflow from data acquisition to analysis and reports.