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Summary of Center Progress

1. Brief description of overall objectives of NA-MIC

The National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC) is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary community of computer scientists, software engineers, and medical investigators who share the common goal of improving healthcare through the development of computational tools for the analysis and visualization of medical image data. The Center continues to maintain a robust and flexible infrastructure for developing and applying advanced imaging technologies across a range of important biomedical research disciplines. Research leading to innovation in medical image analysis is organized around the Computer Science Core, which includes independent teams for Algorithms and Engineering, and the NA-MIC Kit. Four DBPs drive the innovation and image analysis , and scientific CoresResearch CoresThe scientific development is driven by 4 DBPs. In addition to activities that sustain the NA-MIC Kit and integrity of the Center’s software infrastructure, NA-MIC has an impressive outreach program that delivers software, data, and innovative science to the broader biomedical community through its publications and training venues. NA-MIC also has instituted a unique validation effort where software developers and end-users participate in hands-on workshops to measure and improve medical image algorithms.

Required elements:

1. This year NA-MIC hosted 15 workshops and courses at national universities and international venues, providing training and exposure to medical researchers in 3D Slicer and other NA-MIC technologies. NA-MIC also launched the first DTI Tractography Challenge for Neurosurgical Planning at the 14th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2011) conference in Toronto, Canada, demonstrating its continued commitment to validation. The purpose of the validation effort is to assess the performance of NA-MIC algorithms in a variety of clinical arenas. The Center worked synergistically with the Driving Biological Projects (DBPs) to achieve fundamental advances in shape representation, shape analysis, groupwise registration, diffusion estimation, segmentation and quantification, functional estimation, distortion correction, and clustering. Finally, this year saw the release of Slicer version 4.0 and 4.1 (Slicer4) which represents a significant advance in capabilities and underlying technologies. The software was released at RSNA 2011 in November. As in past years, a detailed presentation of current work was made at the All Hands Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, January 9-13, 2012, and can be viewed in detail on the NA-MIC Wiki [http://wiki.namic. org/Wiki/index.php/ 2012_Winter_Project_Week]. This represents the 8th Annual Progress Report and second year of the second cycle of funding. The report includes Highlights and Impact statements, individual progress reports from the four DBPs (Atrial Fibrillation, Huntington’s Disease, Adaptive Radiotherapy for Head and Neck Cancer, and Traumatic Brain Injury), a science and technology summary from the Computer Science Core (Algorithms, Engineering, and NA-MIC Kit), and a review of Training activities, including the validation effort. The report concludes with a bibliography of 33 peer-reviewed journal articles and 21 peer-reviewed conference reports and the annual recommendations of the External Advisory Board, which met on January 12, 2012 in Salt Lake City, coincident with Winter Project Week.