2015 Winter Project Week

Welcome to the 20th Project week page!

Introduction

Founded in 2005, the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC), was chartered with building a computational infrastructure to support biomedical research as part of the NIH funded NCBC program. The work of this alliance has resulted in important progress in algorithmic research, an open source medical image computing platform 3D Slicer, built using VTK, ITK, CMake, and CDash, and the creation of a community of algorithm researchers, biomedical scientists and software engineers who are committed to open science. This community meets twice a year in an event called Project Week.

Project Week is a semi-annual event which draws 80-120 researchers. As of August 2014, it is a MICCAI endorsed event. The participants work collaboratively on open-science solutions for problems that lie on the interfaces of the fields of computer science, mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and medicine. In contrast to conventional conferences and workshops the primary focus of the Project Weeks is to make progress in projects (as opposed to reporting about progress). The objective of the Project Weeks is to provide a venue for this community of medical open source software creators. Project Weeks are open to all, are publicly advertised, and are funded through fees paid by the attendees. Participants are encouraged to stay for the entire event.

Project Week activities: Everyone shows up with a project. Some people are working on the platform. Some people are developing algorithms. Some people are applying the tools to their research problems. We begin the week by introducing projects and connecting teams. We end the week by reporting progress. In addition to the ongoing working sessions, breakout sessions are organized ad-hoc on a variety of special topics. These topics include: discussions of software architecture, presentations of new features and approaches and topics such as Image-Guided Therapy.

Several funded projects use the Project Week as a place to convene and collaborate. These include NAC, NCIGT, QIICR, and OCAIRO. The next events in this ongoing series will occur in Salt Lake City, Utah in January of 2015, followed by one in Boston, MA in June of 2015.

Logistics

• Dates: January 5-9, 2015.
• Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
• REGISTRATION: Coming Soon
• Hotel: Marriott, City Center

Agenda

Time	Monday, January 5	Tuesday, January 6	Wednesday, January 7	Thursday, January 8	Friday, January 9
	Project Activities (Olympus B)	Project Activities (Olympus B)	Project Activities (Olympus B)	Project Activities (Olympus B)	Project Activities (Olympus B)
7:30-8:00		Breakfast (Olympus A)	Breakfast (Olympus A)	Breakfast (Olympus A)	Breakfast (Olympus A)
8:00-10:00		9-10am: Breakout Session:DICOM (Steve Pieper) (Amethyst 1)	9-10am: Breakout Session:QIICR (Andrey Fedorov) (Amethyst 1)	Project Activities (Olympus B)	9am: Project Presentations (Olympus B)
10:00-10:30		Coffee (General area)	Coffee (General area)	Coffee (General area)	Coffee (General area)
10:30-12:00				Project Activities (Olympus B)
12:00-1:00	Lunch (Olympus A)	Lunch (Olympus A)	Lunch (Olympus A)	Lunch (Olympus A)	Boxed Lunch and Adjourn (Olympus A)
1:00-3:00l	Project Presentations (Olympus B)	Slicer Workshop (Ron Kikinis)	(Olympus B)
3:00-3:30	Coffee (General area)	Coffee (General area)	Coffee (General area)	Coffee (General area)
3:00-5:00		Project Activities (Olympus B)		Project Activities (Olympus B)
05:00-07:00				6:00 Optional: Beer at Murphy's (like last year)

Background

Project Week is a hands on activity -- programming using the open source NA-MIC Kit, algorithm design, and clinical application -- that has become one of the major events in the NA-MIC, NCIGT, and NAC calendars. It is held in the summer at MIT, typically the last week of June, and a shorter version is held in Salt Lake City in the winter, typically the second week of January.

Active preparation begins 6-8 weeks prior to the meeting, when a kick-off teleconference is hosted by the NA-MIC Engineering, Dissemination, and Leadership teams, the primary hosts of this event. Invitations to this call are sent to all NA-MIC members, past attendees of the event, as well as any parties who have expressed an interest in working with NA-MIC. The main goal of the kick-off call is to get an idea of which groups/projects will be active at the upcoming event, and to ensure that there is sufficient NA-MIC coverage for all. Subsequent teleconferences allow the hosts to finalize the project teams, consolidate any common components, and identify topics that should be discussed in breakout sessions. In the final days leading upto the meeting, all project teams are asked to fill in a template page on this wiki that describes the objectives and plan of their projects.

The event itself starts off with a short presentation by each project team, driven using their previously created description, and allows all participants to be acquainted with others who are doing similar work. In the rest of the week, about half the time is spent in breakout discussions on topics of common interest of subsets of the attendees, and the other half is spent in project teams, doing hands-on programming, algorithm design, or clinical application of NA-MIC kit tools. The hands-on activities are done in 10-20 small teams of size 3-5, each with a mix of experts in NA-MIC kit software, algorithms, and clinical. To facilitate this work, a large room is setup with several tables, with internet and power access, and each team gathers on a table with their individual laptops, connects to the internet to download their software and data, and is able to work on their projects. On the last day of the event, a closing presentation session is held in which each project team presents a summary of what they accomplished during the week.

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

Please make sure that you are on the na-mic-project-week mailing list

Projects

• Template for project pages

Registrants

Do not add your name to this list - it is maintained by the organizers based on your paid registration. (The Registration Page is Coming Soon, so please give us a few days.)