CTSC Imaging Informatics Initiative

Overview

The CTSC Imaging Informatics Initiative (I3) is planning to provide services for setting up imaging data management systems (IDMS) in support of research and clinical efforts involving imaging in Harvard CTSC. XNAT has been identified for providing the core functionalities of the IDMS. A typical IDMS service 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

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 labs in Harvard CTSC; 2)generate overlapping requirements from these specific needs; 3) prioritize the potential projects to determine next steps; 4)Deploy a demo IDMS based on XNAT.

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

Use Cases

• Ellen Grant, CHB
• Stephan Voss, CHB
• Simon Warfield, CHB
• Bill Hanlon, MGH
• COPD Gene Project, BWH
• Brad Dickerson, MGH
• Dan Iosifescu, MGH

Projects 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.

Status

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

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 discussed to provide an image sharing solution.