CTSC:TTIC.091509

Back to Collaboration:Harvard_CTSC

Agenda:

1. Consultation
2. Report on Catalyst retreat (09/09)
3. Quantitative imaging, update with demo of draft material already prepared for the ACRIN meeting (Randy, Jeff, Wendy)
4. Quantitative imaging talk for Grand Rounds
5. Education program
6. MRI safety
7. TMS practice, guidelines, support and safety
8. ARRA supplement implementation
9. Status of XNAT (Wendy, Mark, Yong)

Harvard Translational Imaging Consortium Meeting Minutes September 15, 2009

In attendance:

• Valerie Humblet
• Gordon Harris
• Simon Warfield
• Jeff Yap
• Wendy Plensiak
• Mark Anderson
• Randy Gollub
• Yong Gao
• Annick Van den Abbeele
• Gordon Williams
• Bill Hanlon
• Bob Lenkinski
• Ron Kikinis
• Laura Alice
• Clare Tempany
• Todd Perlstein

1. Update on imaging consultation requests

• Members were reminded to enter all their consultations in the JIRA system. It is important that all those data are collected. Valerie will work with the people at Dana Farber to collect data from the weekly meeting they have where they advices fellows who want to submit a protocol to the IRB.
• There were 4 new consultations this week, 2 were handled by Randy and the other were assigned to Todd.

2. Update on Catalyst retreat

• The slides presented at the retreat will be available online on the Catalyst website. Valerie will post the link when available.
• The retreat showed a proposal by Catalyst leadership to focus significant resources towards closed mentoring of a cohort of promising clinical translational researchers. To do this, a intensive consultation service will be created. There is also a lot of work being done on the education program. The imaging consortium will be asked to participate in the KL2 Medical Research Investigator Training Program.
• During the retreat, Bruce and Randy talked about the importance to also deliver useful resources to the rest of the scientific community. The MRI safety tutorial created by the imaging consortium is an good example and was very well received. Both the nursing staff at the MGH CRC and a PI wanting to add some MRI safety language in a grant already expressed their interest.
• One question raised during one of the discussion panels was: How to do research across institutions more effectively? Bruce suggested that we must allow PI and patients to move and keep pockets of deep expertise at the different institutions. It is not realistic to get everything everywhere. Oncology and the DFHCC is a good example that it is a viable solution.
• Pilot grants: Catalyst Central and the Research Navigators are working on revising the way pilot grants are awarded. They presented several new ways to fund. For example let clinicians post questions and look for proposals. One of the main concerns about the way pilot grants are awarded now is that it is not focused enough on young investigators.

3. ACRIN meeting

• On Wednesday September 30, 2009 Randy and Jeff will give a lecture at the ACRIN fall meeting, Arlington, VA. The Quantitative imaging workshop is a collaboration with Johns Hopkins.
  • Randy and Jeff showed the first draft of their slides and asked the group for feedback.
  • Wendy and Ron helped them to use Slicer for DCE-MRI. Link to progress report.
  • Jeff asked Valerie to follow up with Bob to see if he would have other data set of DCE-MRI available
  • Annick and Simon insisted on the importance of validation, one must do the assessment of the technique, be able to do test-retest and do the assessment of the clinical outcome. There is a lot of disease activity that sometimes are seen in imaging but can't be seen clinically (eg: MS)

4. Quantitative imaging talk for Grand Rounds

• A presentation of our talk about quantitative imaging has been scheduled on Nov 10 at CHB as part of their Radiology Grand Rounds.
• Gordon Harris tried at MGH bust all the grand rounds are already filled, he will explore other possibilities like residents' week.
• Gordon Williams insisted on the importance to reach out to people outside imaging. Every member was asked to schedule some talks at their institution.
• Valerie will follow up with each leader at the different institutions and post the date of the scheduled talks on the WIKI page.

5. Education program

• Valerie did contact Cindy Fiducia, director of the education program at Catalyst Central to show her the draft of our proposal for education to see if it fits with the Catalyst vision. We are waiting for her feedback.

6. MRI safety

• Valerie will send a copy of the MRI safety material to the members of the consortium. They are asked to review it by the end of the week.
• Once posted on-line it will be important to get in touch with the IT team to ensure that we can get a count of the number of downloads.
• The material will also be distributed to the IRBs.

7. TMS practice, guidelines, support and safety

• Randy was asked by Catalyst Central, as Director of the Biomedical Imaging Core at the Martinos Center, to work on safety guidelines for TMS.
  • The members decided that the imaging consortium should not be involved in that since it is not an imaging technique.
  • The TMS people she can reach out are: at BIDMC, Alvaro Pascual-Leone and at CHB, Alexander Rotenberg at CHB.

8. ARRA supplement implementation

• Randy announced that the ARRA supplement that we submitted back in May (medical informatics) will be funded for 2 years, starting September 30.
• Starting in October, the informatics subgroup should meet weekly, preferably face-to-face because the meetings are usually more productive that way.
• A computer engineer will be hired to work full time on this project. He will be based at CHB. Simon will help getting him an office.

Status of XNAT

• Wendy, Mark and Yong gave an update on the progress made with the different XNAT implementation.
• Descriptions of projects and technical details can be found here , while the worflow can be found here.