CTSC:ARRA.120710

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Agenda

• Update on Phase 3 and Phase 4 mi2b2 software
• PACS Index
• Future meeting plans

Harvard Catalyst Medical Informatics group Meeting Minutes December 7, 2010

In attendance:

• Bill Wang
• Chris Herrick
• Randy Gollub (phone)
• Steve Pieper
• Darren Sack
• Vincent Roch
• Darren Sack
• Charles McGow
• Yong Gao
• Paul Lamonica (phone)
• Kathy Andriole (phone)
• Jon Bickle (phone)
• Bill Hanlon (phone)
• Alex Zeitsev
• Wendy Plesniak (phone)
• Mark Anderson (phone)
• Dan Marcus (phone)

Update on Phase 3 and Phase 4 mi2b2 software

• Working at the CHB site, Paul, Bill and Chris made good progress in installing the mi2b2 software. Paul is able to query and retrieve medical images from mi2b2 easily. Working for all imaging modalities, e.g. MR, CT, ultrasound, PET. Still isn't blazing fast, but Phase 4 will likely improve performance since they are breaking down the steps for file transfer into smaller parts rather than one big step. Will be easier to debug and to optimize overall and perhaps at each site. For instance, Bill and Chris are looking into options such as if a particular step is slow, other steps may be able to proceed in parallel or in separate threads. Current version supports multiple requests, but executed in series.
• Two new servers for MGH have not yet been delivered.
• The GUI programming is progressing. New developments include a widget for monitoring progress of downloads and improvements in usability.

PACS Index

• Randy & Dan met at RSNA to discuss the mi2b2 project. An emergent idea was to build an index of imaging acquisition parameters from the DICOM headers, deleting the image files. Kathy and her colleagues have done this for the BWH site, they have a Data Knowledge Warehouse that can be queried for studies using ~30 different parameters (tags). They use business analytic tools to develop choices for the data elements to include in the Warehouse. It is a multi-dimensional query tool.

• Daniel Rubin, Dan Marcus, Randy and Kathy met at RSNA to discuss potential future collaborations. Many ideas emerged, none that had sufficient clarity to be ready to implement, but all have good intentions and conversations will continue. Similar discussions were had by Randy and Dan Marcus with Joel Saltz and Tony Pan and Ashish Sharma. No clear plans made but interest from both sides to continue to explore future collaboration.

Future meeting plans

• Kathy and another person from BWH Radiology Informatics will lead a web-ex demonstration of their data warehouse in an upcoming meeting. She will let Randy know the date in advance so it will be set up.
• Meetings for 12/21 and 12/28 are canceled for the holidays. But please continue your good work ;)