Post-NCBC-2014

Introduction

NAMIC, the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, was funded by NIH as part of the NCBC program. NIH's intention was to build a computational infrastructure to support biomedical research. The program was designed with a mandatory sunset after 10 years. For NA-MIC, this deadline has been reached in June of 2014. In addition to important progress in algorithmic research NAMIC produced a computational platform for medical image computing, called the NAMIC kit. NAMIC resulted in the creation of a community of algorithm researchers, biomedical scientists and software engineers using the NAMIC kit.

Project Week is a semi-annual event which draws approximately 100 researchers to work collaboratively on open-science solutions for problems that lie on the interfaces of the fields of computer science, mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and medicine. In contrast to conventional conferences and workshops the primary focus of the project weeks is to make progress in projects (as opposed to reporting about progress). The objective of the Project Weeks is to provide a venue for this community of medical open source software creators.

Plans Past June of 2014

Given the vibrant community present at Project Weeks, we intend to continue to organize the events every 6 months. Several funded projects use the Project Week as a place to convene and collaborate. These include NAC, NCIGT, QIICR, OCAIRO. We intend to continue the tradition of openness and accessibility for Project Week.

Relevance to MICCAI

Project week brings together scientists and engineers in the field of Medical Image Computing, both investigating novel methodologies and using tools based on those methods for biomedical research. Project Week nicely complements the other activities at MICCAI in that it is a hands-on working event intended to let participants work on their own projects with access to other scientists working in the same environment.