Biomedical Imaging's Real Bottleneck Is Data Access, Not AI Models

Hospitals, academic centers, medtech firms, and pharma companies all face the same obstacle: imaging data is locked in clinical systems and hard to share. The EXAM study across 20 institutions showed federated learning, which shares model weights rather than patient data, improved AUC by 16% on average. Collaboration remains difficult due to scanner and protocol heterogeneity, privacy governance, and the lack of a common data substrate.