2010 Winter Project Week

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Background

From June 22 through 26, 2009, NA-MIC hosted its FIRST JOINT PROJECT WEEK for hands-on research and development activity in Image-Guided Therapy and Neuroscience applications. The meeting was held at MIT (Cambridge) and at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston). Participants engaged in open source programming using the NA-MIC Kit, algorithms, medical imaging sequence development, tracking experiments, and clinical applications. The main goal of this event was to further the translational research deliverables of the sponsoring centers and their collaborators by identifying and solving programming problems during planned and ad hoc break-out sessions. Active and potential collaborators alike were encouraged to attend, and participants haled from 31 academic centers and 9 companies. The latest in a series of successful Project Events designed to maximize informal interaction between participants, this event was distinguished by the joint participation of several collaborating centers. As such, it was part of the ongoing translational research efforts of NA-MIC, NCIGT, [1], Harvard Catalyst, and CIMIT. It represents an expansion of the NA-MIC Summer Project Week that has been held annually since 2005, and will continue to be held every Summer at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, typically during the last full week of June, and every Winter in Salt Lake City, Utah, typically during the second week of January.

Active preparation for this conference began with a kick-off teleconference. Invitations to this call were sent to members of the sponsoring communities, their collaborators, past attendees of the event, as well as any parties expressing an interest in working with these centers. The main goal of the initial teleconference was to gather information about which groups/projects would be active at the upcoming event to ensure that there were sufficient resources available to meet everyone's needs. Focused discussions about individual projects were conducted during several subsequent teleconferences and permitted the hosts to finalize the project teams, consolidate any common components, and identify topics that should be discussed in break-out sessions. In the final days leading up to the meeting, all project teams were asked to complete a template page on the wiki describing the objectives and research plan for each project. All told, there were 135 registrants and 62 individual projects.

On the first day of the conference, each project team leader delivered a short presentation to introduce their topic and individual members of their team. These brief presentations served to both familiarize other teams doing similar work about common problems or practical solutions, and to identify potential subsets of individuals who might benefit from collaborative work. For the remainder of the conference, about 50% time was devoted to break-out discussions on topics of common interest to particular subsets and 50% to hands-on project work. For hands-on project work, attendees were organized into 30-50 small teams comprised of 2-4 individuals with a mix of multi-disciplinary expertise. To facilitate this work, a large room at MIT was setup with ample work tables, internet connection, and power access. This enabled each computer software development-based team to gather on a table with their individual laptops, connect to the internet, download their software and data, and work on specific projects. Projects that required the use of medical devices were hosted at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. On the final day of the event, each project team summarized their accomplishments in a closing presentation.

A summary of all past NA-MIC Project Events is available here.

Dates.Venue.Registration

Please click here for Dates, Venue, and Registration for this event.

Agenda

Please click here for the agenda for AHM 2010 and Project Week.

Projects

Preparation

1. Please make sure that you are on the na-mic-project-week mailing list
2. Starting Thursday, October 15th, part of the weekly Thursday 3pm NA-MIC Engineering TCON will be used to prepare for this meeting. The schedule for these preparatory calls is as follows:
   • October 15: Engineering Infrastructure Projects
   • October 22: Funded External Collaboration Projects
   • October 29: Funded External Collaboration Projects
   • November 5: DPB Projects
   • November 19: DPB Projects
   • December 3: Other/new collaborations
   • December 10: Finalize Engineering Projects
   • December 17: Loose Ends
3. By December 17, 2010: Complete a templated wiki page for your project. Please do not edit the template page itself, but create a new page for your project and cut-and-paste the text from this template page. If you have questions, please send an email to tkapur at bwh.harvard.edu.
4. By December 17, 2009: Create a directory for each project on the NAMIC Sandbox (Zack)
   1. Ask Zack for a Sandbox account
   2. Commit on each sandbox directory the code examples/snippets that represent our first guesses of appropriate methods. (Luis and Steve will help with this, as needed)
   3. Gather test images in any of the Data sharing resources we have (e.g. the BIRN). These ones don't have to be many. At least three different cases, so we can get an idea of the modality-specific characteristics of these images. Put the IDs of these data sets on the wiki page. (the participants must do this.)
   4. Setup nightly tests on a separate Dashboard, where we will run the methods that we are experimenting with. The test should post result images and computation time. (Zack)
5. Please note that by the time we get to the project event, we should be trying to close off a project milestone rather than starting to work on one...

Previous Project Events

A history of all the programming/project events in NA-MIC is available by following this link.