DRUM: Data-repository for biomedical ultrasound metrology

Experimental measurements of acoustic fields are critical for the development of medical ultrasound software and devices, including for validation of modelling tools and for comparison of measurement equipment and protocols. Data sharing encourages reproducibility and consistency across labs, provides access to other researchers who may not have the equipment or expertise to conduct their own measurements, and provides data which can be used for cross validation of models across the research community. To promote and enable sharing of biomedical ultrasound metrology data across the international community, this open access subject repository has been established within the University College London Research Data Repository. Contributions from research groups across the community are welcomed with the prerequisite that the data supports a peer reviewed publication. All datasets will be released under suitable creative commons licences and assigned a digital object identifier which will form a permanent link to the data which can be used for retrieval and citation of datasets. The repository currently hosts data associated with our published work on ultrasound metrology field characterisation, metrology, and model validation: http://bug.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/research Each record contains one or more .h5 files in which the data is organised under a standard set of fields, containing information on the properties of the sources and sensors and equipment in the signal chains used for measurements; the propagation medium which includes details of any inclusions e.g. tissue or phantoms; the acoustic measurement data and its metadata, and details of the driving conditions under which the measurements were made. A description of the standard file format and its fields can be found at: http://bug.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/data-repository. Each record is also accompanied by metadata (including a DOI, and DOIs of related published articles) by which the records can be searched, and optionally by supplementary material not covered by the standard data file format.