2012 Progress Report Outreach
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Summary of Outreach activities 07/01/2011-06/30/2012
Sonia Pujol, Training Core P.I.
The Training core’s efforts are two-fold: a teaching effort to accelerate the transfer of NA-MIC technology to clinicians and scientists, and a validation effort to investigate the comparative performances of diffusion tensor image analysis algorithms.
• Training Events
NA-MIC training activities over the period September 2011-June 2012 consisted of a series of 12 workshops and courses at national universities and international venues. These outreach events have been part of on-going NA-MIC initiatives or in response to requests by host institutions at both national and international venues.
We have organized outreach events tailored towards a specific group of users such as the 3DSlicer workshop for image-guided therapy research at the University of British Columbia which gathered 20 clinical researchers and scientists, the Cranio-Maxillo Facial Workshop at Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine which gathered 20 participants from the Cephalometric community, and the series of hands-on demonstrations of NA-MIC technology for neurosurgical planning and image-guided prostate interventions that we delivered at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital 2011 Radiology Resident Fair.
We have designed two-day long workshop geared towards both the user and the developer community: we have delivered a two-day Slicer4 training workshop that gathered 36 scientists and clinical researchers at the University of Iowa, and we have been invited to deliver a two-day hands-on seminar on Diffusion Tensor Imaging and Programming in Slicer4 at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, in collaboration with the Madrid-MIT+Vision Consortium.
In addition, we have organized a series of seminars and demonstrations at four international conferences in Radiotherapy, Neuroscience, Biomedical Imaging and Radiology.
- Radiotherapy: the 3DSlicer workshop on the use of Slicer for radiotherapy research led by Gregory Sharp at the Joint meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and the Canadian Organization of Medical Physics (COMP) (2011 AAPM/COMP, July 31-Aug. 1st, Vancouver, Canada) gathered 20 clinical researchers from the radiotherapy community. - Neuroscience: we have organized a one-day satellite workshop at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN 2012, Nov. 12-16, Washington DC): the event combined a series of lectures on the fundamentals of Diffusion Tensor Imaging with hands-on training sessions using NA-MIC technology, and gathered 23 neuroscientists. - Biomedical Imaging: we have delivered a half-day course that guided participants through an integrated workflow for exploring the brain white matter at the SPIE Medical Imaging conference (SPIE 2012, Feb.5-8, San Diego, Ca). - Radiology: NA-MIC presence at the Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA 2011, Nov.27-Dec.2, Chicago, Il) consisted of a full week of training courses and hands-on demonstrations. Our outreach activites at RSNA 2011 included a paper presentation on “Publicly available RadLex-linked Anatomy Atlas for image Analysis, Informatics and Education”, as well as two 1.5 hour hands-on educational courses “3D visualization of DICOM images for Radiological applications” in collaboration with Dr. Kitt Shaffer, Vice-Chairman for Education in Radiology at Boston University School of Medicine, and “Quantitative Imaging for Clinical Research and Practice” in collaboration with Dr. Katarzyna J. Macura MD, PhD., Associate Professor of Radiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Each of our courses gathered between 100 and 125 international radiologists and clinical researchers. We delivered more than 50 hours of hands-on demonstrations at the “3D Slicer open source software platform for segmentation, registration, quantitative analysis and 3D visualization of biomedical image data” exhibit, which was part of the part of the RSNA 2011 Quantitative Imaging Reading Room. The 3DSlicer exhibit introduced translational clinical researchers to the capabilities of the new 3DSlicer software version 4.0 through a series of 13 hands-on demonstrations on a diverse set of topics which included included MRI-based topographic parcellation of human brain, PET/CT quantitative assessment of tumor response, white matter exploration for neurosurgical planning using Diffusion Tensor Imaging tractography, and registration and segmentation strategies for follow-up on cases of Traumatic Brain Injuries.
Finally, we have been invited to disseminate NA-MIC technology in Europe through the presentation of the 3DSlicer application at the Open-source Medical Image Analysis software part of the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2011, Apr. 30-May1, Barcelona, Spain),
Since 2003, the Training Core has trained a total of 2,056 scientists and clinicians on NA-MIC technology.
• Validation Effort We have extended the exploratory research work on the evaluation of DTI Tractography algorithms that we have been conducting since 2007 to the context of neurosurgical planning. While tractography has demonstrated potential to bring valuable information on the spatial relationship of eloquent pathways in the vicinity of a tumor, neurosurgeons are still facing the challenge of selecting the appropriate tractography method and tract selection strategy in the absence of ground truth. A first step towards the validation of DTI tractography algorithms is their comparison on a common set of data. To that end, we have organized the first DTI Tractography Challenge for Neurosurgical Planning at the 14th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2011) conference in Toronto, Canada. The 10-hour long workshop gathered 25 participants and 8 international teams took part in the challenge. The workshop datasets consisted of four neurosurgical cases, and two series of repeated volunteer scans from two healthy subjects. The participants were invited to process two neurosurgical cases and the healthy subject datasets prior to the event, and to analyze two neurosurgical cases on the day of the workshop.
We used a set of qualitative and quantitative metrics for comparing tractography results across teams. Qualitative evaluation of the tractography results was provided by three clinicians and two DTI experts, and focused on the assessment of the anatomical correctness of the tract reconstruction and the spatial relation between the tracts and the tumor. By giving clinicians an overview of the cutting-edge DTI tractography algorithms developed in research, and providing algorithm developers with feedback from leading neurosurgeons on a common set of data, this workshop built a two-ways bridge between the scientists who create the tractography tools, and the clinicians who use the tools in neurosurgical settings. The tractography results obtained on the challenge datasets demonstrated a large variability among tractography methods, and motivated the organization of a second edition of the NA-MIC DTI Tractography Challenge at MICCAI 2012.
Summary of NA-MIC Outreach events (Sept. 2011-June 2012)
1. 3DSlicer workshop for radiotherapy research, 2011 AAPM/COMP meeting, Aug.2, Vancouver, Canada http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/Events:2011-08-02-AAPM-Slicer-Users-Group-Meeting
2. 3DSlicer workshop or image-guided therapy research, Aug.4, 2011, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/Events:UBC_3D_Slicer_workshop_August_2011
3. MICCAI 2011 DTI Tractography Challenge for Neurosurgical Planning, Sept. 18, Toronto, Canada http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/Events:_DTI_Tractography_Challenge_MICCAI_2011
4. Brigham and Women’s Hospital Resident Fair, Nov.2, 2011 Boston, MA http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/BWH_Resident_Fair
5. Joint Cephalometric Expert Group Workshop, Nov.9, 2011, Cleveland, OH. http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/CMF_Workshop_Cleveland
6. SFN 2011, Nov.11, Washington D.C. “White Matter Exploration with Diffusion Tensor Imaging: Fundamentals and Perspectives” http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/SFN2011_Diffusion_Tensor_Imaging_Analysis_Workshop
7. “Quantitative Medical Imaging for Clinical Research and Practice”, RSNA 2011 Refresher course, Nov.27, 2011, Chicago, Il http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/RSNA_2011#Quantitative_Medical_Imaging_for_Clinical_Research_and_Practice
8. “3D Interactive Visualization of DICOM images”, RSNA 2011 Refresher course, Nov.29, 2011, Chicago, Il http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/RSNA_2011#3D_Interactive_Visualization_of_DICOM_images
9. “The 3D Slicer open source software platform for segmentation, registration, quantitative analysis and 3D visualization of biomedical image data”, RSNA Quantitative Imaging Reading Room, Nov.27-Dec.2, 2011 http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/RSNA_2011#RSNA_2011_Quantitative_Imaging_Reading_Room
10. “Exploring Brain Connectivity in-vivo: from Theory to Practice”, NA-MIC course at SPIE Medical Imaging 2012, Feb.5, San Diego, Ca http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/SPIE_2012_DTI_Workshop
11. 3DSlicer presentation at ISBI 2011, Apr.30, May 1st, Barcelona, Spain http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/opensource_mia_ws_2012/
12. NA-MIC Training Workshop at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, May 21-22, 2012, Madrid, Spain http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/Madrid-May-21-2012-Slicer-Workshop
