CAMERA — Consortium for Advancement of MRI Education and Research in Africa
Overview
CAMERA is a global network of MRI experts working to establish sustainable access to high-value MRI for research and clinical care in Africa through local capacity building. It was founded in 2019 after a needs-assessment effort identified the scarcity of MRI equipment, training, and supportive policy as the principal barriers to neuroimaging research across the continent. Coordinated by Udunna Anazodo at the Montreal Neurological Institute and operating closely with partners in Nigeria, CAMERA serves as the parent body for a set of African neuroimaging programmes spanning data archiving, training, and analysis. Its work targets the near-total absence of African populations from global open neuroimaging datasets, a gap with direct consequences for how widely brain research generalises.
Activities
CAMERA coordinates several programmes that together build the African neuroimaging data ecosystem. These include the African Neuroimaging Archive (AfNiA), an effort to aggregate and openly share brain MRI from the region, and a group of capacity-building programmes covering training and analysis, among them SPARK (medical-imaging AI training), Scan With Me (SWIM), and CONNExIN. CAMERA convenes radiologists, imaging physicists, computational scientists, and policy experts, and runs symposia at international MRI society meetings.
Connections
- relatedTo: MNI (CAMERA is coordinated from the Montreal Neurological Institute)
- relatedTo: ABDN (parallel African brain-data capacity effort)
Resources
- https://www.camera-mri.org
- https://doi.org/10.1002/nbm.4846 (Anazodo et al. 2023, NMR in Biomedicine — framework for advancing sustainable MRI access in Africa)
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46567-3 (Anazodo et al. 2024, Nature Communications — the future of MRI in Africa)