Toward Ensuring Data Quality in Multi-Site Cancer Imaging Repositories

Cancer remains a major global health challenge, affecting diverse populations across various demographics. Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into clinical settings to enhance disease outcome prediction presents notable challenges. This study addresses the limitations of AI-driven cancer care due to low-quality datasets by proposing a comprehensive three-step methodology to ensure high data quality in large-scale cancer-imaging repositories. Our methodology encompasses (i) developing a Data Quality Conceptual Model with specific metrics for assessment, (ii) creating a detailed data-collection protocol and a rule set to ensure data homogeneity and proper integration of multi-source data, and (iii) implementing a Data Integration Quality Check Tool (DIQCT) to verify adherence to quality requirements and suggest corrective actions. These steps are designed to mitigate biases, enhance data integrity, and ensure that integrated data meets high-quality standards. We applied this methodology within the INCISIVE project, an EU-funded initiative aimed at a pan-European cancer-imaging repository. The use-case demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in defining quality rules and assessing compliance, resulting in improved data integration and higher data quality. The proposed methodology can assist the deployment of big data centralized or distributed repositories with data from diverse data sources, thus facilitating the development of AI tools.