Terms of Use

3. Uploaded examinations

By uploading ultrasound images or clips, you confirm that all content is fully de-identified — no patient names, dates of birth, medical record numbers, facility identifiers, or any other protected health information (PHI), whether shown in the image, in the file name, or in the file metadata — and that you have the right to share it. Uploads containing PHI are removed. Compliance with your institution's policies and applicable law (including HIPAA) remains your responsibility.

3a. Four separate permissions

Submitting an examination for review grants us the right to do that one thing. Every other use is a separate, optional permission that you give or withhold on the upload form. Declining any of them has no effect on your feedback, your review, or your certification progress.

• Competency review (required, and inherent in submitting) — your examination is viewed and scored by an expert reviewer so that you receive feedback and progress on the competency pathway.
• Education (optional) — your de-identified clip may be used as teaching material: the clip gallery, the phenotype and quality drills, the case library, and course decks.
• Research model training (optional, on by default) — your de-identified clip may be used to train and validate the EASy research model, a non-commercial research project. This permission is presented already selected on the upload form; untick it there to decline, or withdraw it at any time from your submissions page, which removes the clip from future training runs.
• Commercial AI development (optional, and never assumed) — your de-identified clip may be used in the development of a commercial AI product. This permission is recorded separately and is never inferred from any other.

A default is not a substitute for asking. The research permission is shown on the upload form, in plain words, with its default stated beside it, and it can be declined before uploading or withdrawn afterwards from your submissions page. What we do not do is take an answer you were never shown: consent is never read backwards out of an older licence, and the commercial permission is never pre-selected at all.

Examinations uploaded before these permissions were separated were submitted under a licence covering education, expert review, quality assurance and model training. We do not infer research consent backwards from it. Those examinations are treated as carrying the education permission and no commercial permission, and they are excluded from research-model training until their uploader gives that permission explicitly. We are contacting earlier contributors to ask; until someone answers, their clips stay out of every training run.

3b. How uploaded examinations are handled

• Controller. Bughrara LLC is the entity responsible for uploaded examinations and the decisions made about them.
• Who can see them. You; the expert reviewers and course faculty assigned to review your work; and site administrators. A clip becomes visible to other registered users only under the education permission above. Files are held in private storage and served through short-lived, access-checked links rather than public URLs.
• Retention. Examinations supporting an in-progress competency record are held until that record is complete. The verified examinations underpinning an issued EASy competency certificate are held for seven years from the date of issue, after which the clips are deleted and only the certificate record itself is kept. Examinations that are not part of a certification record are deleted 24 months after upload, unless a permission you granted keeps a de-identified copy in the teaching or research corpus. You may request deletion at any point, and we act on it except where a completed certification record depends on the clip. Aggregate and de-identified statistics may be retained after deletion.
• Metadata and burned-in PHI. De-identification remains yours to do before upload — see the de-identification guide. Two automated controls now back that up. Embedded file metadata is removed from every upload before it reaches our storage: EXIF and XMP blocks, comment and timestamp records, and the container-level tags in MP4/MOV, JPEG and PNG files. And sampled frames are machine-screened for burned-in identifiers — a patient banner, a name, a record number, a date. Anything the screen suspects holds the submission for a reviewer: it is kept out of the teaching material and out of every model training set until a person has looked at it. Nothing is deleted or rejected automatically, because a false positive must not cost you an examination. Neither control is a guarantee: screening samples frames rather than every frame, it reads printed overlays rather than everything an image might reveal, and it does not examine the text you type. Uploads found to contain PHI are removed.
• Withdrawing a permission. You may withdraw the education, research, or commercial permission at any time by writing to us. Withdrawal stops the use going forward, removes the clip from the teaching surfaces it appears on, and excludes it from every subsequent training run.
• Model weights already trained. We state this plainly: a model that has already been trained cannot have one contribution removed from its weights. Withdrawal removes your clip from the corpus and from all future training; it does not retroactively alter models trained before the withdrawal. Those models are not re-derived from your clip and your clip is not redistributed.
• Where data is held. Storage, database and hosting are provided by Supabase and Vercel and may be processed in the United States and in other countries where those providers operate. Uploading from outside the United States involves an international transfer on that basis.
• If something goes wrong. If we become aware of unauthorised access to uploaded examinations, we investigate, contain, and notify affected uploaders and, where applicable, the relevant institution — without waiting to be asked.