Medical Image Analysis Stack Exchange Proposal

I started a new project I'd like to present. As a programmer I spend a non-trivial amount of time searching StackOverflow for information and answers to coding questions, as I'm sure most readers of this blog do as well. It's an interesting site, merging the Q&A model with that of a wiki/crowdsourcing community, causing it to attract a lot of expertise and become extremely popular in the software community. They explain it better than I do.

For about a year now I've been thinking that this sort of system could be very powerful as a source of information in other fields, specifically my native field of computational image analysis. Such a resource would have been invaluable during my graduate school tenure (community mailing lists and Google can only go so far) for image analysis information, and it also would allow more interaction between experts and others in the community so that ideas and expertise could be more effectively disseminated. Now with the release of the Stack Exchange Area 51, I have the opportunity to do something about it. I give you:

Medical Image Analysis Stack Exchange

At this point I like to reach out to anyone in the image analysis community to try to get people participating in the formation of the site. Its currently in definition phase, which basically means that users propose questions and the community votes on whether those questions are on topic for the site or not, defining the topic scope of the site. From there, hopefully it continues growing and becomes a useful resource for researchers, programmers, clinicians, or anyone interested in the topic. With the formation of a solid community, this could be a valuable discussion hub for students studying image analysis as well.

I urge anyone interested to go sign up and help us get the number of users necessary to take this to the next level. Think of the poor grad students.

Image analysis rules. Tell your friends.