A multi-site imaging study lives or dies on how easily researchers can exchange images. Burning discs, emailing zip files, or asking each site to upload to a different shared drive makes studies slow, hard to audit, and risky for patient privacy. Radiology image sharing platforms built for research solve this by letting investigators at different institutions work on the same de-identified imaging data, with the right access for each person. This guide explains how sharing works for clinical trials and for academic research, and what to check on access, login, and security.
For research, image sharing means that studies leave the hospital already de-identified, arrive in one central project, and are visible only to the people who need them. Sponsors, CROs, sites, and readers can all work on the same data without passing files around.
It is a different job from moving images between care providers. Researchers need pseudonymization before transfer, project-level permissions, reader workflows, and a complete audit trail. For how a research platform differs from a PACS, read Medical Imaging Platform vs. PACS.
In a clinical trial, imaging data flows between many parties: hospital sites, one or more CROs, central readers, and the sponsor. Collective Minds Research, a GCP-compliant medical imaging research platform, brings them into one place with role-based access for sponsors, CROs, and sites, so each party sees only what they should.
This is the setup used by biotech, pharma, and medtech sponsors. See the pages for biopharma, biotech and medtech, and CROs, or the Clinical Trial Imaging Platform.
Academic groups share imaging data for investigator-initiated studies, multicenter consortia, and institutional repositories. The needs are similar, with fewer central roles and more collaborators from outside the institution.
On Collective Minds, external collaborators are invited as named users with role-based permissions, and the project admin can revoke access at any time. All sharing activity is logged. More than 300 institutions are connected to the platform, and the controls are aligned with the requirements commonly set by IRBs and ethics committees. Documentation of certifications and data handling practices is available for ethics submissions. Learn more on the hospitals and academia page.
Sharing starts at the site. Collective Minds Connect is a DICOM gateway, a secure edge gateway installed at the hospital that replaces the manual export, de-identification, and upload of DICOM files. It receives studies pushed from the PACS or scanner, manually or automatically, and de-identifies, anonymizes, or pseudonymizes them under user-defined rules, including removal of burned-in annotations, before they are encrypted and sent to the project.
Connect works with any PACS that can add another destination node, and it needs no inbound firewall ports. Sites without a gateway can use web upload, or premium sFTP for bulk transfer.
Who can see what is the heart of safe research sharing. The platform controls access in three layers.
Every access is logged, and data stays separated between studies. Data is pseudonymized for collaborators while remaining traceable on the sponsor side.
Imaging studies contain protected health information, so the strongest safeguard is to remove identity at the source and never store personal sensitive information in the platform.
For compliance in trials, see our guide to clinical trial imaging compliance. To remove sensitive pixel data before sharing, use the Collective Minds DICOM Anonymizer.
Use these questions to compare platforms.
Other research imaging platforms worth comparing include Flywheel, QMENTA, and the open source XNAT. For the wider workflow, read how to centralize medical imaging data for multi-site studies.
Each site installs a DICOM gateway that receives studies from the PACS or scanner, pseudonymizes them under the trial rules, and sends them encrypted to the central project. This removes manual exports and uploads and keeps transfers logged.
Sites send studies from their PACS or scanner to a gateway that pseudonymizes them under study rules and forwards them, encrypted, to a central project. Collaborators then access the data through role-based permissions, and every action is logged.
They are invited by email as named users with a role, and a project admin can revoke access at any time. Collaborators from any institution can be added with their site affiliation.
Yes. Collective Minds supports single sign-on through OIDC or SAML with hospital or university identity providers.
Yes. Hospitals and universities use it for investigator-initiated studies and multicenter consortia, as well as for clinical trials with CROs and sponsors.
Data is pseudonymized or anonymized before it leaves the hospital, and personal sensitive information is not stored on Collective Minds. Access is role-based and logged.
No. It works alongside the PACS. Collective Minds works with any PACS that can add another destination node, so it fits your existing infrastructure.
A signed Master Services Agreement and Data Processing Agreement are required before collaboration starts.
Reviewed by: Pilar Flores on October 16, 2026