CTSC Imaging Informatics Initiative

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Note: This is a work in progress

Overview

The Harvard Catalyst Medical Imaging Informatics Bench to Bedside (mi2b2) Initiative is preparing to provide services for setting up imaging data management systems (IDMS) to support research and clinical efforts involving imaging for Harvard Catalyst affiliated investigators. Two simultaneous (and potentially conflicting) priorities are to 1) provide optimal, customized hardware and software tools for each investigator/ laboratory and 2) to harmonized these solutions to allow for aggregation of the raw and derived medical imaging data for subsequent sharing beyond the investigator/ laboratory.

XNAT has been identified as a potential software solution for providing the core functionalities of a Harvard Catalyst IDMS. A typical IDMS service engagement will include the following steps:

• Requirement gathering
• Gap analysis
• Infrastructure setup
• Data modeling
• IDMS installation and setup
• Data loading
• Testing and evaluation
• Ongoing data entry, data loading/transfer, and system monitoring and maintenance
• System upgrade

mi2b2 Phases

Planning and Information Gathering

The goals of current phase of the initiative are to:

1. Gather concrete and specific requirements for imaging data transfer and management from a number of high-volume imaging projects led by Harvard Catalyst-affiliated investigators that are generating valuable derived image data with the intention to share that data beyond their own laboratory;
2. Generate a list of overlapping requirements from these specific investigators;
3. Prioritize the projects to determine next steps;
4. Deploy a demo IDMS based on the default XNAT source code;
5. Assess the effort required to extend XNAT code to support the features identified.

Prototype Development

CHB

• Grant Lab

MGH

• Dickerson Lab

Use Cases

(Template

• Mission
  • Description of big picture, goal(s) of project
• Participants
• Data Types
  • Project
  • Imaging Modalities
  • Genetic
• Storage needs
• Workflow
  • Other software to be integrated (e.g., Osirix)
  • other features
• Data transfer
• Data Management)

The use cases presented here are based on on-going informal interviews with various labs and email communications.

Clinical

• Dan Iosifescu, MGH
• Biomarkers for appendicitis
• Mild cognitive impairment

Research

• Ellen Grant, CHB
• Stephan Voss, CHB
• Simon Warfield, CHB
• Bill Hanlon, DF/HCC
• COPD Gene Project, BWH
• Brad Dickerson

Project Prioritization Criteria

Possible criteria include:

• Impact
  • Number of users
  • Duration of the project
  • Amount of data (# of subjects, # of scans ...)

• Success Potential
  • Commitment of PI
  • Feasibility: is it a good fit for using XNAT?
  • Availability of project support at each stage of the effort, including requirement gathering, data collection, system testing, continuing IT and informatics support.

Current Status

Test installations of XNAT (1.4 release candidate 2) were done on Windows XP and Linux in VMware. Minor issues in the setup process needs to be fixed to make successful installation on Windows Vista.

Requirement gathering from several research and clinical projects have been conducted.

XNAT 1.4R2 setup/installation process semi-automated.

XNAT extension prototype built.

Explored ways of extracting and loading additional DICOM fields.

Other Software

In addition, an evaluation of dcm4chee|[1] (a DICOM Implementation in JAVA) is in progress. Simon's group runs an instance of dcm4chee. XNAT's DicomServer and DicomBrowser are based on dcm4che.

The Globus MEDICUS (Medical Imaging and Computing for Unified Information Sharing)|[2] has been proposed to provide an image sharing solution.

Reporting and database management of radiological data for clinical trials offered by http://tumormetrics.org/

Evorad Medical Imaging Workstation from http://www.evorad.com/