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Challenges are being increasingly viewed as a mechanism to foster advances in a number of domains, including healthcare and medicine. Large quantities of publicly available data, such as TCIA, and cultural changes in the openness of science have now made it possible to use these challenges, as well as crowdsourcing (enlisting the services of people via the Internet), to propel the field forward.

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As explained in the Challenge Management System Evaluation Report, challenge hosts and participants cannot do it alone. Hosts must ensure that the data used in challenges are free of Protected Health Information (PHI), which is critical and non-trivial,  require access to large compute clusters with computing power, storage space, and bandwidth.. . The computing resourcing needed to process these large datasets may be beyond what is available to individual participants. For the organizers, creating the infrastructure that is secure, robust and scalable can require resources such as IT support, computing capability, and domain knowledge, which are beyond the reach of many researchers. Additionally, imaging formats for pathology images can be proprietary and interoperability between formats can require additional software development efforts. For participants,Resources such as the Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) have greatly reduced the burden for sharing medical imaging data within the cancer community and making these data available for use in challenges.

The Pilot Challenges sub-project of CTIIP seeks to make a set of integrated data from TCIA and TCGA available for "pilot challenge" projects develop knowledge extraction tools

Medical Imaging Challenge Infrastructure (MedICI), a system to support medical imaging challenges.

by developing knowledge extraction tools and comparing the decision support systems for clinical imaging, co-clinical imaging, and digital pathology,

by which will now be represented as a set of integrated data from TCIA and TCGA. The intent is not to specifically implement a rigorous “Grand Challenge”, but rather to develop “Pilot Challenge “projects. These would utilize limited data sets for proof-of-concept, and test the informatics infrastructure needed for such “Grand Challenges” that would be scaled up and supported by extramural initiatives later in 2014 and beyond.

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