CTSC:TTIC.120908

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Action Items (details below)

1. There will be a special meeting to discuss the Imaging Liaison candidates on Friday December 19th at 9:30 am. Please schedule all interviews with the candidates and update the form sheet for evaluations on the xythos site after the interview no later than December 18th.

Harvard Translational Imaging Consortium Meeting Minutes December 9, 2008

In Attendance (via phone):

• Randy Gollub
• Carolyn Zyloney
• Jeff Yap
• Bill Hanlon
• Clare Tempany
• Annick D. Van den Abbeele
• Laura Alice
• Sarah McMordie
• Stephan Voss
• Bill Hanlon

• Karl Helmer was a special guest at the t-con this week. He is project manager for the morphometry BIRN project and helped draft the proposal for the new BIRN coordinating center. He will help make the BIRN group aware of Harvard Catalyst's goals.

1. CTSC Imaging Consultation Request

• The Imaging Consortium received one consultation request and discussed it during the t-con.
  • In the request, a researcher asked for assistance with a pathology and biochemistry imaging project.
  • The Consortium unanimously agreed that questions concerning biochemical and pathological laboratory techniques do not fall into the domain of the CTSC Imaging Group. These kinds of requests will be forwarded to the CTSC Navigators, who can help direct researchers to the appropriate resources.

• Annick received an additional consultation request concerning the resources at the NMR Center.
  • Randy plans on requesting Greg Sorenson's assistance with consultation requests concerning the resources within the Martinos Center.
  • When hired, the Imaging Liaison will be in charge of creating a list of resources at each site and using this list to respond to consultation requests.

• The Imaging Consortium discussed setting up a policy for the CTSC review of Imaging protocols
  • Stephan mentioned that at another CTSC, their staff looks through every protocol in order to help researchers work most efficiently within the system.
  • Under the GCRC system, all high risk protocols (such as those involving the use of a contrast agent) underwent review from the GCRC and GAC.
  • The Imaging Consortium has volunteered to serve as an Imaging consultant in the CTSC's scientific committee that will review those grants that are not NIH or peer-reviewed. This committee is replacing the GACs.
  • The Imaging Consortium agreed that we should review all high risk protocols. The Consortium will advertise its services to all investigators but not require lower risk studies to use our services.

2. Imaging Information and Acquisition Liaison Job Position

• The Imaging Consortium set December 18th as the deadline for members to complete interviewing the candidates and post their evaluations on the xythos site.
  • The Imaging Consortium members have already met with or have scheduled interviews with three qualified candidates for the position.
  • The Imaging Consortium unanimously decided to offer an interview to the most recent candidate.
  • The CTSC Diversity Group has volunteered to assist the Imaging Consortium in finding additional qualified candidates for the position.
  • There will be a special t-con on Friday December 19th at 9:30 am to discuss the candidates and make a decision to hire the most qualified applicant.

• Randy Gollub accepted the role of being in charge of the Imaging Liaison when he or she is hired.
  • Randy will serve as the connection between the Liaison and the Imaging Consortium. She will be the person primarily in charge of training the Imaging Liaison in conjunction with Carolyn, assigning tasks for the new employee to complete, and supervising the Imaging Liaison.
  • The Imaging Liaison job description will be edited to reflect Randy's role as a mentor.

• When hired, the Imaging Liaison will assume the following responsibilities:
  • triage of consultation requests
  • organizing the educational program
  • drafting a list of the resources at each site within the Harvard CTSC
  • organizing a standard language for IRB submissions that include imaging
  • setting up and training people to use the physiological monitoring system

3. Report from RSNA

• Jeff Yap reported to the group a summary of the RSNA Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance (QIBA) meeting and the breakout working groups in PET, MRI, and CT (held December 4th).
  • The CT group focused on the topics of defining volumetric CT data and the use of IHE for informatics standards.
  • The MR group is involved in a multi-site cross platform data acquisition and calibration project. IRAT developed a phantom for DCE. This phantom will be sent around to several sites and scanned in MRI machines from different vendors with the goal of measuring the degree of standardization among the different scanners. The consortium noted that this project has goals that overlap with the goals of the morphometry BIRN (mBIRN) project and has requested a list of the sites involved in this project in order to learn if there are places where BIRN can provide support for this QIBA initiative.
  • The PET working group is involved in several projects: co-variates in SUV calculations, scanner qualifications and quality control in the scanner, IHE framework, structured reporting, and annotation of images.

• Randy reported on the medical information software developed in collaboration with caBIG and noted that many efforts were synergistic or easily brought in harmony with the Imaging Consortium's informatics plans.

She described the following projects:

• • Randy, Ron Kikinis, and Dan Marcus met with Dan Rubin, the PI of the NCBC Annotation and Image Markup (AIM) project. AIM is interoperable with RadLex (Radiology Lexicon). Dan Marcus and Dan Rubin developed a plan to integrate AIM into XNAT.
  • They learned about the features of caGRID, including caPortal and the work tools included in the de-identification toolkit. caGrid's tools and underlying technologies, based on the globus toolkit, have the potential for future applications for layering on top of Harvard Catalytst's informatics efforts.
• XIP will improve the integration of analysis and data management. The Slicer toolkit can integrate with XIP.

• The IT session at RSNA included a discussion of image sharing between 5 sites. NIBIB has agreed to help with this effort and has requested that the project be piloted on a multi-centered clinical trial at 5 sites. If it is successful the program will be available for download at the other 8 sites.

• The Imaging Consortium unanimously agreed to continue with our plan to connect the XNAT instances at each of the institutions within the Harvard CTSC.
  • To ensure that XNAT is interoperable with the hospital PACs systems, the group will work with the IT/clinical developers at each institution.
  • In designing this first step for connecting the Harvard institutions, the Harvard CTSC Imaging Group will work to ensure that our system is interoperable with the national goals and systems.

• Randy will circulate the job description for the CTSC XNAT engineer/IT expert who will help accomplish the above goals.
  • The Consortium would like to hire this person soon.
  • There is currently one potential candidate for the position and others will be recruited when the job description is finalized.
  • Bill Hanlon has agreed to assist in interviewing candidates for this position.
  • Randy will invite John Gabrieli from MIT to assist in the interview process.