Dissemination:Progress Report:2011

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NA-MIC Dissemination Update, Year 1 of the Second Funding Cycle/Year 7 since Inception

The dissemination goal in the second funding cycle of NA-MIC was to building upon the outreach activities that were established in the first year 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 2005 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 first cycle, continued to gain momentum this 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 seventh year was maintained at 2 weeks per year - the last week of June at MIT, as well as four days in conjunction with the all-hands meeting in January. The 11th PROJECT EVENT was held June 21-25, 2010 in Boston, at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital. It recorded 126 registered attendees, who worked on 71 projects. These attendees represented 30 academic sites and 15 companies. The 12th PROJECT EVENT was held January 10-14,2011 in Salt Lake City, Utah. It recorded 106 registered attendees, who worked on 59 projects. These attendees represented 20 academic sites and 9 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 remained an active participant in the Common Toolkit effort, of which it was a founding member, 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. Participation in CTK has expanded to include Georgetown University, UPF in Barcelona, and AZE, a Japanese radiology workstation vendor. 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 has gained traction as a hub for medical image computing development. 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 3300 pages and maintained over 730 users. (At the start of the first cycle, we had 350 pages and 150 users and at the end of the first cycle we had 2800 pages and 650 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.