CTSC:TTIC.120908

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Action Items (details below)

1. There will be a special meeting to discuss the Imaging Liaison candidates on Friday December 19th at 9:30 am. Please schedule all interviews with the candidates and update the form sheet for evaluations, including a ranking of the candidates, on the xythos site after the interview no later than December 18th.

Harvard Translational Imaging Consortium Meeting Minutes December 9, 2008

In Attendance (via phone):

• Randy Gollub
• Carolyn Zyloney
• Jeff Yap
• Bill Hanlon
• Clare Tempany
• Annick D. Van den Abbeele
• Laura Alice
• Sarah McMordie
• Stephan Voss

• Karl Helmer was a special guest at the t-con this week. He is project manager for the morphometry BIRN project and helped draft the proposal for the new BIRN coordinating center. He will help make the BIRN group aware of Harvard Catalyst's goals.

1. CTSC Imaging Consultation Request

• The Imaging Consortium received one consultation request and discussed it during the t-con.
  • In the request, a researcher asked for assistance with a pathology and biochemistry imaging project.
  • The Consortium unanimously agreed that questions concerning biochemical and pathological laboratory techniques do not fall into the domain of the CTSC Imaging Group. These kinds of misdirected requests will be forwarded to the CTSC Navigators, who can help direct researchers to the appropriate resources such as Pathology or one of the other Core labs.
  • Randy and CTSC Central staff agreed that the boundary between the kinds of consultation requests that fall inside and outside of the Imaging Consortium's domain should be defined in order to increase the efficiency with which consultation requests can be directed to the appropriate service. Additionally, Randy proposed creating an interface through which CTSC Navigators can easily communicate with the Imaging Liaison regarding consultation requests. Additionally, CTSC Central's web development team will be asked to develop electronic tools to help direct consultation requests to the appropriate consulting group.

• Annick received an additional consultation request concerning the resources at the NMR Center.
  • Randy plans on requesting Greg Sorenson's assistance with consultation requests concerning MR/PET within the Martinos Center.
  • When hired, the Imaging Liaison will be in charge of creating a list of resources at each site and using this list to respond to consultation requests.

• The Imaging Consortium discussed setting up a policy for the CTSC review of Imaging protocols
  • Stephan mentioned that at another CTSC, their imaging staff looks through every protocol that involves imaging in order to help researchers work most efficiently within the system.
  • Currently at the Martinos Center, studies with high risk designs cannot use the scanners.
  • Formerly, all high risk protocols (such as those involving the use of a contrast agent) underwent review from the GCRC and the GAC in order to get approval to use special equiptment such as the physiological monitoring system and drug infusion pumps.
  • The Imaging Consortium has volunteered to serve as an Imaging consultant in the CTSC's scientific committee that will review those grants that are not NIH or peer-reviewed. This committee is replacing the GACs.
  • The Imaging Consortium agreed that we should continue this policy of reviewing all high risk protocols, but that there was no reason for increasing the level of oversite via review from the Imaging group members. Each Consortium member can propigate this policy at his or her own institution.

2. Imaging Information and Acquisition Liaison Job Position

• The Imaging Consortium set December 18th as the deadline for members to complete interviewing the candidates and post their evaluations on the xythos site.
  • The Imaging Consortium members have already met with or have scheduled interviews with three qualified candidates for the position.
  • The Imaging Consortium unanimously decided to offer an interview to the most recent candidate.
  • The CTSC Diversity Group has volunteered to assist the Imaging Consortium in finding additional qualified candidates for the position.
  • There will be a special t-con on Friday December 19th at 9:30 am to discuss the candidates and make a decision to hire the most qualified applicant. Consortium members are requested to post their evaluations of the candidates and a rank ordering of these applicants on the xythos site in advance of the t-con.

• Randy Gollub accepted the role of being in charge of the Imaging Liaison when he or she is hired.
  • Randy will serve as the connection between the Liaison and the Imaging Consortium. She will be the person primarily in charge of training the Imaging Liaison in conjunction with Carolyn, assigning tasks for the new employee to complete, and supervising the Imaging Liaison.
  • The Imaging Liaison job description will be edited to reflect Randy's role as a manager.

• When hired, the Imaging Liaison will assume the following responsibilities:
  • triage of consultation requests
  • organizing the educational program
  • drafting a list of the resources at each site within the Harvard CTSC
  • organizing a standard language for IRB submissions that include imaging
  • setting up and training people to use the physiological monitoring system
• This list to be further elaborated by Consortium members pending further discussion.

3. Report from RSNA

• Jeff Yap reported to the group a summary of the RSNA Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance (QIBA) meeting and the breakout working groups in PET, MRI, and CT (held December 4th).
  • The CT group focused on the topics of defining volumetric CT data and the use of IHE for informatics standards.
  • The MR group is involved in a multi-site cross platform data acquisition and calibration project. IRAT developed a phantom for DCE. This phantom will be sent around to several sites and scanned in MRI machines from different vendors with the goal of measuring the degree of standardization among the different scanners. The consortium noted that this project has goals that overlap with the goals of the morphometry BIRN (mBIRN) project and has requested a list of the sites involved in this project in order to learn if there are places where BIRN can provide support for this QIBA initiative.
  • The PET working group is involved in several projects: co-variates in SUV calculations, scanner qualifications and quality control in the scanner, IHE framework, structured reporting, and annotation of images.

• Randy reported on the medical information software developed in collaboration with caBIG and noted that many efforts were synergistic or easily brought in harmony with the Imaging Consortium's informatics plans.
  She described the following projects:
  • Randy, Ron Kikinis, and Dan Marcus met with Dan Rubin, the PI of the NCBC Annotation and Image Markup (AIM) project. AIM is interoperable with RadLex (Radiology Lexicon). Dan Marcus and Dan Rubin developed a plan to integrate AIM into XNAT.
  • Randy, Ron, and Dan also met with Tony Pan, colleague of Joel Saltz who is the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU), Ashish Sharma from OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics, John Paul Mulhern and Mark Adams, Project Manager on the caBIG project at Booz | Allen | Hamilton. They learned about the features of caGRID, including caPortal and the work tools included in the de-identification toolkit. caGrid's tools and underlying technologies, based on the globus toolkit, have the potential for future applications for layering on top of Harvard Catalytst's informatics efforts.
  • The developers of XIP, including Larry Tarbox from Washington University in St. Loius, met with Randy Gollub and Ron Kikinis to explore the possibility of integrating the Slicer toolkit as a visualization tool within the XIP framework.

• The Tuesday evening RSNA sponsored National CTSC meeting was attended by Annick, Randy, Bill Hanlon, Dan Marcus, Jeff Yap, and Gordon Harris.
  • Three sites -- Mayo Clinic, Cornell, and Duke -- made presentations about medical imaging within their CTSCs and the goals they are working to accomplish. All three sites have developed plans to support medical imaging but are still working to acquire resources to support their proposals (flier with agenda).
  • Brad Erickson led the discussion, following the November 7th meeting, to try to advance the details of the Image Sharing Infrastructure Proposal in preparation for submitting a grant proposal to NIBIB.

• The Imaging Consortium unanimously agreed to continue with our current medical imaging informatics plans as outline previously in the 5 page proposal.
  • Randy Gollub shared Dan Marcus's opinion that the Imaging Consortium should commence with looking for a skilled IT person to start working on the development of this project, and the group unanimously agreed with this plan. Randy will circulate the job description for this CTSC XNAT engineer/IT expert.
  • There is currently one potential candidate for the position and others will be recruited when the job description is finalized.
  • Bill Hanlon has agreed to assist in interviewing candidates for this position.
  • Randy will invite Gabriele Fairello, the Head of Neuroinformatcs at the Harvard Center for Brain Science, to assist in the interview process.