CTSC.TTIC.minutes.070808

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Action Items (details below)

1. Site representatives need to update their resources, you can do so on our wiki or send info to Ann for assistance
2. Begin collecting educational resources already available to catalog on wiki
3. Annick and Clare to bring back to group draft consulting plan

Harvard Translational Imaging Consortium Meeting Minutes July 8, 2008

In Attendance (in person at the Martinos Imaging Center, Charlestown):

• Stephen Voss, Children's
• Simon Warfield, Children's
• Ron Kikinis, BWH
• Clare Tempany, BWH
• Bill Hanlon, MGH
• Gordon Harris, MGH
• Annick Van den Abbeele, DFCI
• Robert Lenkinski, BIDMC
• Randy Gollub, MGH
• Bruce Rosen, MGH
• Ann Schlesinger, CTSC Navigator

Meeting began with welcoming Simon Warfield who will partner with Stephen Voss to represent Children's hospital. We then toured the Martinos imaging facilities and GCRC supported Biomedical Imaging Core unit. Note that this is just a subset of MGH based imaging resources. We are updating our wiki page to include this more comprehensive catalog.

Then we began to gather ideas from group for vision of what we could/should do

• Unanimous agreement that this Consortium envisions itself as an expert consulting body to the CTSC and the affiliated academic medical centers in the domain of medical imaging. Consensus agreement that this group is willing to systematically explore, discuss and then come to agreement on policies for medical imaging related issues that are causing obstacles for clinical translational investigators.
  

Specific examples include:

1. Screening forms/policies for MRI scanning
2. MRI safety training procedures for staff
3. Recommendations for screening prior to injection of gadolinium contrast

• Consensus that it will take some time to come to a clear view of what domains of infrastructure/expertise/etc should be disseminated across our sites and what should be centralized at some or one site. Agreed that there will not be a "one size fits all" solution. Randy and Bruce to gather more information on the level of resources available to the Consortium to guide this decision making.

Updates to topics already underway

1. Consultation Service
Update on this expected next week from Annick and Clare.

2. Education Program
Randy met with the new CTSC Director of Educational Programming, Dr. Eric Rosenberg (MGH) and the MGH based Clinical Research Education Unit (Dr. Janet Hall, Liz Salomon and staff) on July 3rd. The great news is that this highly experienced team is going to facilitate the CTSC Education programming. They accepted gladly the role we hoped that they would of doing all the logistical support work for our educational offerings. In fact, Dr. Rosenberg offered to work with us as the "test case" for how to structure and deliver CTSC didactics. Their team had very specific, helpful suggestions for how to achieve our goal of disseminating to the clinical translational investigators the current state of the art of biomedical imaging capabilities and how to access them. After hearing these suggestions, the Consortium, with all sites in attendance, unanimously agreed to the following plan:

• The first and most important dissemination/training material we will develop will be a primer on medical imaging tools and how to use them for clinical translational and/or clinical trials research. The content will include:

1. descriptions of what modalities are available within the CTSC umbrella
2. how to decide what modalities to use
3. what the outcome measures of each mean including the current standards for sensitivity and specificity and sources of variability
4. how to access these facilities within the CTSC
5. future directions including imminently available capabilities within the CTSC

• The format will be Miniseries delivered each week on four consecutive weeks, each lecture 60-90 minutes (final choice has to wait until we finish developing content)
• Pre-register attendees, consider a small registration fee if there are costs for materials, consider sending out reminder to all registrants via their pagers 15 minutes before each session.
• Live presentations will be offered on both Longwood and MGH campuses either simultaneously or serially
• Suggested time based on highest attendance for busy clinicians is Tuesdays from 3:30 or 4 PM to 5:00 PM
• Electronic capture (audio, video or both) and/or remote streaming is up to the Education group to determine and deliver
• Presentation materials will be turned into self-teaching materials (similar to the NA-MIC tutorial materials) as a collaborative effort between this Consortium group and the Education group.
• Expect to deliver this same content (appropriately updated) at least annually, or more depending on demand
• Agreed that this first offering would be a shared responsibility for development and content will necessarily be dependent on our decisions about what services we will offer and how.
• Target milestone is to have first offering within 6 months, success of this mostly dependent on how long it takes to work out CTSC logistics (e.g. consultation services agreements)

Next steps are to collect didactic materials already available from all Consortium members, and in our next meetings refine the content further then identify who will prepare the first draft of the primer and who will deliver the presentations.

3. Collaborative response to Harvard wide Technology White Paper
Bruce Rosen is still trying to reach Eleazer Edelman. In the meantime Dean Flier has released another very relevant [White Paper] on Imaging that has several statements that clearly delineate the important role of our efforts in the HMS strategic plan.

4. Curation of Site resources
All site representatives will either learn to use this wiki or designate someone to assist them. The Navigators will also help out. When the CONNECT portal becomes active, hopefully their team will be responsible for porting our content to their site. After the meeting, Randy and Ron began training Ann and Gordon on how to use this wiki. To be continued....

5. Regulatory Issues
In this as in all our past meetings an issue or question that required input from the Regulatory group was raised. This time is was whether it would be possible in the transition from GCRC to CTSC oversight to lower the barriers to utilization of our resources by clinical translational investigators (e.g. will there still be formal applications? GAC review?). Randy and Bruce discussed this further with the Navigators and made a formal request to have someone from the Regulatory group attend one of our future meetings to collect our questions/suggestions about issues that come up for us as well as to be updated by them on their plans for the CTSC that are underway.

6. Face to face meeting dates
Gordon Harris confirmed the date for hosting this group. Still to be determined are dates for the DFMC and Children's service.