How Germany’s university hospitals built a shared platform for radiological imaging data, and what comes next
In early October 2026, representatives of the Network University Medicine (NUM), researchers and IT teams from the RACOON network, and technical partners came together at the RACOON Research Days in Tübingen. The focus was on where the project stands today, how it is evolving and the work that still lies ahead.
During the event, we spoke with Ralf Heyder, head of the NUM Coordination Office at Charité. In this short interview, he describes RACOON from the NUM’s perspective: what the network aims to achieve, what role RACOON plays in it, and where the platform is headed.
What is the NUM and what are its goals?
The Network University Medicine is an alliance of all 37 German university hospitals. They joined forces in clinical research in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, having realized that at the start of the pandemic, Germany was unable either to roll out large clinical trials or to bring together routine data from patient care at the national level. The network has now been working on these problems for more than six years. It has built solutions that will make large clinical trials and the nationwide use of patient data possible in the future.
What role does RACOON play in the NUM and what makes it stand out?
The Network University Medicine is building infrastructures for different types of medical data so that these data can be shared across all 37 sites. RACOON is one of these infrastructures. It specializes in imaging data, meaning MRI, CT and other large imaging datasets. It brings these data together and makes them available to researchers. What makes RACOON special is that it is the first platform of its kind in Germany and, to the best of our knowledge, unique worldwide, because 37 legally independent hospitals are voluntarily sharing their data.
Where does RACOON stand today and where is it headed?
Over the past six years, RACOON has shown that the approach of bringing all 37 university hospitals in Germany onto a shared platform for imaging data works. The challenge now is to turn a small number of successful research projects, already implemented within the NUM as a proof of concept, into many. In other words, to scale.
The second major topic: so far, the platform has mainly been used and developed by radiology. Now, other specialties are to be added, such as radiation oncology, nuclear medicine and pathology, so that Germany has a truly interdisciplinary platform for imaging research.
