Dissemination:Progress Report:2010

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NA-MIC Dissemination Update, Year 6

The dissemination goal in the sixth year of NA-MIC was to continue the outreach activities that were established in the prior years of the center. In addition to the training events reported by the Training core, birds-of-a-feather meetings were held in collaboration with the Service core. The wiki-based collaborative web presence was also maintained and expanded this year.

The Dissemination Core has again been active in promoting NA-MIC methodologies and technologies among the scientific communities. A complete list of events is available on the NA-MIC web site, but a few notable activities in the past year are described below.

Birds-of-a-Feather Meetings: The “Programming Week” event that was started in the first year of NA-MIC to gauge the interest of participants in spending a week together working on NA-MIC projects, renamed to "Project Week" to reflect its expanded its scope and duration in the second, third, and fourth years, continued to gain momentum in the sixth year. It continues to include projects that involve all the center cores as well as several funded and non-funded collaborators. The duration in the sixth year was maintained at 2 weeks per year - the last week of June at MIT, as well four days in conjunction with the all-hands meeting in January. The FIRST JOINT PROJECT WEEK (and the ninth NA-MIC Project Event) was held June 22-26, 2009 in Boston, at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital. It recorded 134 registered attendees, who worked on 62 projects. These attendees represented 31 academic sites and 9 companies. The 10th PROJECT EVENT was held January 4-8,2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah. It recorded 107 registered attendees, who worked on 49 projects. These attendees represented 22 academic sites and 6 companies. The projects, agenda, and affiliations of attendees are detailed below.Details of all programming/project weeks are available here: http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/Engineering:Programming_Events.

In addition, the Dissemination Core has worked to foster connections with national and international communities of developers with similar goals and philosophies. For example, NA-MIC has been a founding participant in the Common Toolkit effort to create a medical imaging software package that can be shared be across many applications. Participants include The German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Inria, the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University, and Siemens Corporate Research. The CTK group has adopted many of the core software technologies from the NA-MIC Kit (in particular ITK, VTK) and, just as importantly, has adopted the NA-MIC software engineering methodology of CMake/CTest/CDash, and even uses the na-mic.org wiki to organize events. The Dissemination Core has also reached out to the Neuroimaging in Python (nipy) community to share code and information about fMRI and diffusion analysis. These groups share NA-MIC's commitment to open source for medical image analysis and bring important new ideas and software contributions to the NA-MIC effort. Connections with groups such as CTK and nipy, along with collaborations with NCIGT, BIRN, and the Harvard Catalyst CTSA, are an important source of new ideas to help NA-MIC software efforts grow and adapt to new opportunities.

Web Presence: The collaborative wiki (http://wiki.na-mic.org) has expanded to over 2800 pages and maintained over 650 users. (In Year 1, we had 350 pages and 150 users, in Year 2 we had 700 pages and 200 users, and in Year 3 we had 900 pages and 300 users, in Year 4 we had 1100 pages and about 600 users ) In addition to the NA-MIC investigators use of these wiki pages, the usage by external collaborators continues to expand and lead to independent wikis in several cases.