Radiology Research Plattform: How RACOON and Firemetrics Make Imaging Data Usable for Multicenter Studies in All University Hospitals

Firemetrics is the technological backbone in the RACOON project

With RACOON (“Radiological Cooperative Network”), Germany is building one of the world’s most ambitious imaging platforms in academic medicine - and Firemetrics is providing the backend. RACOON is an infrastructure of the Network University Medicine (NUM) that connects all German university hospitals to make medical imaging data rapidly and efficiently usable for research. Its goal is to provide a nationwide, user-friendly platform that accelerates mono- and multi-centre studies and enables optimal use of clinical and research data, particularly for AI-based analysis. Firemetrics provides the technological backend for the radiology research platform and all research sites. This marks the first nationwide deployment of Firemetrics within the German university medicine.

What RACOON Aims to Achieve with the Radiology Research Platform

RACOON connects the radiology departments of all university hospitals via local RACOON nodes and a central environment (“RACOON-CENTRAL”). The goal is to make imaging data - such as CT and MRI studies - available in a structured, secure, and research-ready manner.

Through RACOON, researchers will be able to:

• plan and conduct multi-center studies more easily,

• analyze structured radiology findings across sites,

• train AI models for image analysis either federated or centrally.

RACOON-CENTRAL thus becomes the “single source of truth” for imaging data and associated clinical data in university medicine.

Firemetrics’ Role in the Project

This is exactly where Firemetrics comes in: the platform provides the backend for RACOON-CENTRAL and all RACOON nodes. This includes in particular:

• a FHIR-based data space for study and metadata,

• a relational FHIR engine for high-performance, complex queries,

• connectivity to PACS and object storage (e.g., DICOM/DICOMweb, S3),

• visualization and dashboarding capabilities.

On this foundation, project teams can harmonize data in a standardized way, store it with quality assurance, and analyze it in real time without having to operate a highly complex data infrastructure themselves. Firemetrics’ no-code/low-code interface also enables the creation of dashboards and analyses without requiring deep expertise in SQL or FHIR.

Prof. Dr. med. Tobias Penzkofer, co-coordinator of the RACOON network, states:

“The decision in favor of Firemetrics was based on objective performance criteria - especially for complex, cross-site queries - and on its ability to provide a unified data space with standardized interfaces that supports harmonization and analysis without adding technical complexity at the individual sites.”

Rollout Across All German University Hospitals

Through the RACOON project, Firemetrics was introduced at all German university hospitals. This creates a unified data and analytics layer that future NUM projects and clinical research networks could also directly build upon.

For participating sites, this means:

• a centrally maintainable and interoperable backend instead of many isolated solutions,

• clearly regulated governance and access concepts,

• and an infrastructure designed for reusability, scalability, and data protection.

Blueprint for Other Medical Domains and the EHDS

RACOON is not only exciting for radiology: the project can serve as a model for other research areas such as oncology, pathology, or cardiology, which face similar challenges in data management, interoperability, and analytics.

Beyond Germany, RACOON also sends an important signal:

• for other countries aiming to build national research data spaces,

• and for the emerging European Health Data Space (EHDS), which requires exactly these kinds of interoperable, standards-based, and privacy-compliant architectures.

With RACOON, German university medicine demonstrates what a modern, anonymized imaging data space can look like - and Firemetrics provides the technical foundation to ensure that this data space not only comes into existence, but is also used in everyday research and innovation.