CTSC:ARRA.100609

Back to CTSC:ARRA supplement

Agenda:

1. Introduction
2. Brief scope of expertise
3. Scope of work
4. Conclusion

Harvard Catalyst Medical Informatics group Meeting Minutes October 6, 2009

In attendance:

• Valerie Humblet
• Mark Anderson
• Randy Gollub
• Yong Gao
• Bill Hanlon
• Ron Kikinis
• Todd Perlstein
• Wendy Plesniak
• Shawn Murphy
• Diane Keogh
• Mike Mendez
• Steve Piper
• Richard Robertson
• Stephan Voss
• Danny Shaw
• Ramin Khorasani
• Kathy Andriole
• Michael Clyne
• Jesse Wei
• Alexander Zaitsev

1. Introduction

• Randy welcomed all the participants and gave a very brief introduction about the ARRA supplement. The Administrative Supplement award was received on September 30, the official dates of the project are 9/24/09- 9/23/11.
• Lee Nadler, as PI of the Harvard Catalyst is also the PI of this supplement.
• Randy will be in charge of all the administrative tasks. The first thing that she did when the funding of the supplement was announced was to offer a full time job to a Computational Engineer that has a lot of experience in imaging data repository. He will join the team in a couple of months.

2. Scope of expertise

First all the participants introduced themselves, gave a brief update on their background and talked about what they hope to achieve within this project.

• Randy Gollub

Randy is from MGH (neuroimaging), she is the co-director of the Catalyst Imaging Consortium and the co-Investigator on this ARRA supplement. Clinical data are a tremendous resources and should be easily accessible for secondary use for research. Randy is aware that the regulations, the issue of patient privacy will require a lot of effort.

• Diane Keogh

Diane is the Director of Research Computing at Partners HealthCare. She is usually not involved in individual projects but will provide support to this group.

• Danny Shaw

Danny is the Director of Knowledge Management at Children's Hospital. The clinical research IT team reports to him. He hopes that the tools that will be created will be as self-service as possible.

• Ramin Khorasani

Ramin is vice chair of Radiology at BWH, he is also the Director of Medical Imaging Information Technology and the Director of the clinical PACS system. His goal is to support the research effort by making clinical data available easily as long as it does not disrupt the clinical practice.

• Shawn Murphy

Shawn is the co-investigator on this supplement. He is also one of the Core Leaders for the i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) project. There are 3 i2b2 instances: BIDMC, CHB and Partners. So far i2b2 focus on a collection of codes from patient, the database is filled with informations from billing, labs etc but nothing from imaging. Being able to deliver images in the context of research is very important.
The infrastructure that will be build during the next 2 years must be scalable to big volume of data. There will be a need for flexibility, different departments at different institutions will have different workflows.

• Todd Perlstein

Todd is a Fellow in Cardiovascular Medicine at BWH, his interest is on cardiac ultrasound. He is also a member of the Catalyst Imaging Consortium. He will provide the group with good test cases for clinical research. For example, his group has collected a lot of cardiac US but so far has no access to it for secondary use.

• Alexander Zaitsev

Alex is a member of the SPL lab at BWH. Right now he is working on supplement 3D Slicer and Extensible Neuroimaging Archive Toolkit (XNAT) with workflow management system. Provide integration and interoperability between 3D Slicer, XNAT Services and 3-rd party image processing applications and high performance computing systems. Implement it as within currently developed Structural Planning and Implementation in Neurological Exploration (SPINE) System.

• Stephan Voss

Stefan Voss is a radiologist specialized in pediatric oncology at CHB. He is also a member of the Catalyst Imaging Consortium. He defines himself as an end-user of image data, he is involved in several large multi-centers clinical trials.

• Richard Robertson

Rick is the Clinical Radiologist-in-Chief and the Medical Director of Radiology Informatics at CHB. He wants to understand the scope of the project to make sure that the right representative from his institution attends the weekly meetings.

• Mike Mendez

Mike is a software development engineer and a project manager for i2b2.

• Ron Kikinis

Ron is the founding Director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory at BWH. He has been doing full time research on image processing, 3D Slicer, Multi-centers studies (BIRN).
Research needs its own PACS, its own workflow. XNAT will fulfill a need for research because it is more flexible that the clinical PACS.

• Yong Gao

Yong is computer scientist working part-time or the Catalyst. He works towards data sharing across sites and is setting up XNAT instances at CHB and MGH.

• Wendy Plesniak.

Wendy is a Research Fellow in the Surgical Planning Laboratory at BWH. She has a lot of expertise on interface design and mapping use cases with the technology.

• Mike Clyne is the Systems Manager, MIIT / Data Storage, he works at BWH where he supports the PACS system.

• Kathy Andriole

Kathy is the Director of Imaging Informatics, CEBI (BWH). She is working on the construction of a research PACS, this system will be web-based and accessible from any Partners workstation. One of her goal is also to expose commercial tools to the research community, her group is doing a lot of testing of these tools.

• Steve Piper

Steve is a medical image analyst, he is the founder of Isomics. That company provides specialized services to academic and business clients in the fields of software development, image analysis, and technical management with applications in medical research, product development, and manufacturing. He has a lot of experience in multi-institutions software venture. One of his main concern is to make sure that teh research work will not affect the clinical practice.

• Jesse Wei

Jesse is a radiologist at BIDMC, he is also the director of informatics for the Radiology department. He is very interested by the possibility to integrate images with i2b2.

• Mark Anderson

Mark is Research Programmer in the Surgical Planning Lab (SPL) at BWH. Right now one of his projects is the implementation of a XNAT server for BWH.

• Bill Hanlon

Bill is the project manager for the tumor image metrics core (TIMC). He is bringing a lot of expertise in technical issues linked to data sharing between institutions. Eventually TIMC could be an end-user of this new system. Their special requirement is a very short turn around (48 hours or same day)

3. Scope of work

• Shawn gave a presentation of the scope of the project.
  • One goal is to be able to request images in i2b2 with an accession number. Then a request could be forwarded to the clinical PACS directly or the images can be send to a repository (XNAT). If a research PACS exists, it gets easier, again we don't want to put burden on the clinical staff, the people in charge of the clinical PACS etc.
  • After deindentification, the images will be sent to XNAT. XNAT is an open source software developed at Wash U by Dan Marcus. It is a system designed for clinical research and its own specificities (how the data need to be stored, data manipulation etc).
  • XNAT has a plug-in that can go into i2b2. So the PI who requests the images stays in i2b2 and views the images to do his research project. From that, he will derive new data that will then be put into the i2b2 database. So in the next 2 years, there will be no image data sharing yet, we will only share at the data level,
• Ramin proposed an alternative that is a much simpler solution then replicate the data and it does not require the same need for security and privacy. This alternative would be to provide image viewer tools. For example in RPDR, one can find all the data for a patient. It would be great to add a link to be able to view the images. It is a simpler model that could take care of 70 % of the research needs.
  • With such a solution came the problem of post-processing often used in research. If the PI is only able to view the images, he will not be able to use all the specialized research tools available.
• Shawn defined 3 use cases for this project:
  • The researcher who tries to confirm a diagnosis. He can used a client based viewing tool.
  • The researcher who wants to view the images and evaluate them but don't need post-processing.
  • The researcher that we really want to serve: the one that has built a software to do post-processing automatically and needs the DICOM images to run his tool. XNAT does that very well.

4. Conclusions

• The goal of this project is not to create a mirror PACS.
• Each institution should bring their own requirements to be able to know what the oversights are.
• There is a need to clarify who will determine access to imaging data when someone put a request. It is also important that people understand how data will be access and shared.
• Each institution has to decide who is the right people that should attend the meetings. Having a defined agenda ahead of time would help making that decision, almost on a weekly basis.
• Randy proposed to do a demonstration to teach what SHRINE and i2b2 can offer so far.
• Ron suggested a discussion of what XNAT central has done.