[OME2026] Secure by Design, Collaborative by Necessity: Image Data Management with OMERO Plus in Academic Medicine

Abstract: NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences support a large and diverse research community in which pre-clinical discovery is tightly coupled to clinical and translational science. In this setting, imaging is both ubiquitous and heterogeneous, spanning basic science, pre-clinical models, and patient-adjacent workflows. Ensuring that this rich ecosystem can collaborate effectively—while operating within a highly secure academic medical environment—places significant demands on IT infrastructure and data governance.

In this talk, I will describe our experience deploying and operating OMERO Plus as a central image data management platform within this complex landscape. I will discuss how we integrated OMERO Plus into an institutional environment that must simultaneously meet stringent security, compliance, and privacy requirements and support open, cross-lab collaboration for graduate students, postdocs, and career scientists. Topics will include architectural choices, authentication and authorization strategies, handling of sensitive and non-sensitive datasets, and approaches to interoperability with analysis pipelines and other research systems. I will discuss where we fall short and how we aim to improve.