Big heart data: advancing health informatics through data sharing in cardiovascular imaging.

The burden of heart disease is rapidly worsening due to the increasing prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Data sharing and open database resources for heart health informatics are important for advancing our understanding of cardiovascular function, disease progression and therapeutics. Data sharing enables valuable information, often obtained at considerable expense and effort, to be reused beyond the specific objectives of the original study. Many government funding agencies and journal publishers are requiring data reuse, and are providing mechanisms for data curation and archival. Tools and infrastructure are available to archive anonymous data from a wide range of studies, from descriptive epidemiological data to gigabytes of imaging data. Meta-analyses can be performed to combine raw data from disparate studies to obtain unique comparisons or to enhance statistical power. Open benchmark datasets are invaluable for validating data analysis algorithms and objectively comparing results. This review provides a rationale for increased data sharing and surveys recent progress in the cardiovascular domain. We also highlight the potential of recent large cardiovascular epidemiological studies enabling collaborative efforts to facilitate data sharing, algorithms benchmarking, disease modeling and statistical atlases.