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Action Items (details below)

Harvard Translational Imaging Consortium Meeting Minutes November 4, 2008

In Attendance (via phone):

• Randy Gollub
• Carolyn Zyloney
• Jeff Yap
• Bill Hanlon
• Gordon Harris
• Gordon Williams
• Clare Tempany
• Annick D. Van den Abbeele
• Laura Alice

1. Educational Program

• The Imaging Consortium will set dates and times for the upcoming educational seminars at an upcoming meeting.
  • In order to secure a room at BWH and MGH, these educational meetings must be booked well in advance.
  • The Slicer presentation held in Fall 2008 had a limited capacity of 20-40 seats, and these seats filled quickly. It is hoped that there will be equally strong demand for the upcoming educational seminars

2. Imaging Information and Acquisition Liaison Job Position

• The job description has been circulated through several outlets:
  • MGH has been asked to post the position on the Partners careers site
  • An email with the job description was sent to the Martinos Center community via email.
  • An ad for the position was posted on the RSNA web site starting in mid-November. It will be posted there for a month.
  • The ad has also been posted on numerous career websites.
  • The ad will be featured in the December issue of Radiology (an RSNA publication).
  • A short description of the position will be posted on a monitor at the Career Connection booth at the RSNA Conference in December.
• Three promising candidates have been invited in for interviews with several members of the consortium.
  • The candidates have been instructed to contact the interviewers and set up appointments.
  • Several consortium members have confirmed that all three candidates have contacted them.
  • Interviews will continue through the next few weeks.

3. Neuroinformatics

• Randy Buckner and John Gabrieli expressed strong support for the CTSC Imaging program.
  • Investigators ask them many questions, which can be directed to the Imaging Consortium's consultation service now.
  • Both sites have requested help in obtaining physiological monitoring equipment for research purposes that is comparable to the physiological monitoring system in use at the Martinos Center at MGH.
  • Representatives from the BIDMC, as well as the other sites within the Consortium, are invited to request a physiological monitoring system if desired.

4. Pilot Grant update

• The CTSC has decided not to hold a second round for Pilot Grant submissions this year due to the large volume of applications during the first round.
• A number of grant applications were developmental not clinical
• Notifications of which projects have been chosen to receive funding will be sent out soon.
• It is not clear if the consultation service will play a role in supporting the pilot grants, but the Consortium is awaiting advise and instruction from CTSC central on this issue.

5. Update from the Informatics Meeting

• Bill Hanlon will attend the November 7th meeting in Chicago
  • Imaging Consortium members are requested to submit their requirements for the Informatics system to Bill
• Bill will speak with Karl Helmer, who works with the BIRN coordinating center
• The Informatics meeting was held at Harvard's Countway Library directly following the Imaging Group meeting.
  • The representatives from the Imaging Group together with Shawn Murphy presented the XNAT proposal to the Informatics group.
  • There was uniform positive response to the proposal from the Informatics group
  • They were supportive of adding medical imaging data to the data types that can be hadled through i2b2
  • However, the group outlined the problems that may arise due to the accessing of imaging data in PACs systems and the difficulty of working with medical imaging meta-data
  • The XNAT software has been able to deal with these issues effectively.
• The Imaging and Informatics Groups will present the proposal to Harvard CTSC Central and the heads of informatics at each institution within this CTSC
  • Shawn Murphy and Diane Keogh from Partners Research Computing will make the presentation to the Head of Partners Computing
  • Bill from BIDMC will make a presentation to Jim Murray, the Director of Clinical ___.
  • The BIDMC is not set up for interfacing with the PACs systems.
  • Zak Kohane will share this proposal with the heads of the CTSC.
  • This proposal is also being forwarded to the IT committee
• The proposal calls for CTSC Central to hire an engineer to integrate XNAT and i2b2.
• Randy will contact Suzanne Churchill, the director of i2b2, to obtain a list of all the CTSC sites that are using i2b2 currently
• Dan Marcus is meeting with the National CTSC Imaging Working Group, which is planning on submitting a NIBIB grant for the national Informatics effort. The Harvard CTSC Imaging Group may want to consider submitting a companion grant or participating in this grant submission.
• Jeff Yap raised the question of transferring information from the clinical data to the Imaging data fields, because currently a large portion of the data must be manually entered. There may be issues of regulatory compliance here and this issue may require multiple solutions.

6. Consultation Page Update

• Biostatistics and Genetics have made changes to their pages
• CTSC Catalyst has created a mock up of the Imaging page.
• Final edits to the page have been suggested and the page will go live on the Catalyst website soon.