CTSC:TTIC.092810

Back to Collaboration:Harvard_CTSC

Agenda

1. Consultations update
2. Follow-up from last meeting about consultation/progarm marketing
3. Preparation of Imaging Synergie series (October 27) and BWH/DFCI Radiology Core Clerkship (October 15)

Harvard Translational Imaging Consortium Meeting Minutes September 21, 2010

In attendance:

• Valerie Humblet
• Randy Gollub
• Charles Guttmann
• Bob Lenkinski
• Todd Perlstein
• Annick Van den Abbeele
• Ron Kikinis
• Simon Warfield
• Gordon Harris
• Jeff Yap
• Gordon Williams

1. Consultations update

• We have seen an increased in the number of requests for consultation lately, essentially because people start to learn to use the webform to request consultation instead of contacting the consultant directly.

2. Follow-up from last meeting about consultation/progarm marketing

• Last week we had a very productive face-to-face meeting. We decided that we should do it more often, every 6 weeks. The next face-to-face will be held at DFCI on November 2nd, 9-10 am.
• A couple of ideas from last week on how to increase the use of our consultation service: contact pilot grants applicants who had expressed interest in imaging, work with the IRB on a review/approval process for protocols with imaging, offer to do more imaging protocol review for the different institutions.
  • Right now, if someone apply for a protocol approval to use one of the PCIR centers it requires to be review and approved by a statistician. We could try to implement the same for protocols with an imaging component. It is already the case at DFCI with the concept review meeting (for clinical trials), even if the study has already received NIH approval.
  • A biostatistician review is also mandatory for the IRB, right now there is a review of the radiation dose (radiation safety) but none for the science itself. As Jeff mentioned, adding a mandatory review by the imaging consortium, one that would not delay the IRB approval, is difficult to do, it is almost a full time job to review all the protocols, the burden of work would be overwhelming. A compromise would be to offer our services to anyone interested and to try to help the people in the beginning of their project. When a protocol is submitted to the IRB, very often it is already multi-institution, industry sponsored and it is hard to make changes.
  • Simon gave some input on how things are handled at CHB. The IRB receives only a small number of protocols with an imaging component. The PI needs to make a request to the Radiology Department (that is separated from the radiation safety review). Radiology then works with them to establish the imaging protocol, the process tuns in parallel with the IRB review.
  • Bob brought the topics of incidental findings: most people are not aware of it, there is a need to have someone on the protocol who can read a scan and intervene medically if there is a finding. Charles mentioned that at BWH each research scan is read by a radiologist who reports the eventual incidental findings.
• What should be our next step?
  • Regularly, the Harvard Catalyst regulatory committee has a meeting with the heads of the IRB of the different institutions. Randy suggested to request a 10 minutes slot during one of the coming meeting to present the services we offer and let them know that they can refer PIs to us.
  • Instead of trying to have a mandatory imaging review process, Annick suggested to start with something simpler. We could try to convince the PIs to focus on quantification and test/retest for their studies. There will be a sentence added to the consent form for the subjects mentioning that some tests might be done twice. It would allow us to gather a lot of data to validate our imaging tools and no matter the disease, it is relevant to the modality. We could then go to the IRB work with them on a mandatory imaging review.