National Imaging Facility Incubator

Federated identity for trusted access to biomedical data

AAF has partnered with the National Imaging Facility (NIF) to explore improved access and collaboration for complex multi-site human imaging projects and clinical trials involving imaging and other biomedical data.

NIF is Australia's advanced imaging network, and provides access to imaging equipment, expertise, tools, data, and analysis. AAF is collaborating with NIF through the Trust and Identity Pathfinder program, funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). The strategic goal is to make imaging data a national asset, through a data collections capability. The program will assist NIF and its data partnerships achieve the strategic goal of generating valuable imaging data collections that answer important medical research questions.

Peter Bugeia, NIF's National Data Co-ordinator, says "Through a trust and identity solution, NIF's partners, institutional researchers, and external users will be able to access sensitive data and collaborate more securely and effortlessly. Trusted identities and centralised access control play a pivotal role when undertaking complex, multi-site human imaging projects, such as national clinical trials. To have a data collections capability we need to ensure that the user community can control who gets access to what information.

"This has been a long-term goal of NIF, and this incubator will enable us to move towards our goal of maximising NIF's impact by operating as an integrated, national scale platform, as outlined in our strategic roadmap 'Because Seeing Changes Everything'", he notes.

A Trust and Identity Framework for medical data and platforms

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) is developing a system-wide Trust and Identity Framework for Australia's national research infrastructure. As Australia's Federation for research and higher education, we are collaborating with the community and adapting a globally recognised framework to enable best practice trust and identity, for seamless and secure access to the entire national research infrastructure ecosystem.

The Trust and Identity Framework consists of both technology and policy, to facilitate trusted access. Through the NIF incubator we are exploring both solutions. For instance, we are exploring the technology required to provide a user with a single trusted identity to allow them to gain access to multiple services and pass data between services. Such streamlined access is crucial for large collaborative research projects across multiple organisations and is typically challenging for organisations to manage.

In the NIF incubator we are specifically exploring how to provide a single point of access for XNAT (an open source, subject oriented, image data repository) and REDCap (a clinical trial and participant management platform) and support data flows between these systems for multi-site projects. The findings from this incubator will inform the national approach for NIF, enabling network partners and the NIF user community to connect institutional REDCap instances and multiple site-specific XNAT repositories under a unified user access regime.

We are also exploring authorisation through group management and access controls. We aim to remove the challenges associated with managing complex access management systems across multiple identities and platforms, and provide a single dashboard to enable group management, with multiple tiers of access.

Additionally, policy is crucial for the effective management of trusted identity access and membership management. Privacy and data protection policies provide a common understanding of where data is stored and how it is protected. And crucially, it ensures a shared understanding of who is allowed access and in an event of a security incident, how they are managed. In this NIF incubator we are exploring what policies are required to manage access to sensitive data, that is de-identified and protects an individual's privacy.

• Image credit: National Imaging Facility Advanced Human MRI capabilities at SAHMRI

Find out more

• Watch Peter Bugeia present at AAF's public webinar 'Trust and Identity Information Session 2023'. >> Watch the recording
• An update of the incubator was presented at eResearch Australasia Conference 2023 in 'A blueprint for a system-wide approach to Trust and Identity'. >> View the slides here