CTSC:TTIC.071409

Back to Collaboration:Harvard_CTSC

Agenda

1. Consultations
2. Mission statement
3. Update from the Catalyst Education committee
4. e-mail for Grand Rounds
5. Informatics update

Harvard Translational Imaging Consortium Meeting Minutes July 14, 2009

In attendance:

• Valerie Humblet
• Clare Tempany
• Charles Guttmann
• Todd Perlstein
• Yong Gao
• Randy Gollub
• Laura Alice
• Simon Warfield
• Bill Hanlon
• Bruce Rosen
• Karl Helmer
• Gordon Harris

1. Update on imaging consultation requests

• There was no new consultation submitted through the Catalyst website this week
• Several members received informal consultations, they will transmit the info to Valerie who will enter them manually as soon as JIRA is launched

2. Mission statement

• The members agreed that the consultation service is only a small part of what the consortium is doing. We need to define more broadly what is our mission:
  • Promote use and development of medical imaging technology towards understanding and curing of disease
  • Reduce barriers to collaborations by enabling medical imaging data acquisition, sharing and management across individual investigators and organizations with dedicated hardware and software
  • Provide leadership for the use of quantitative biomarkers in imaging

3. Update from the Catalyst Education committee

• Elliott Antman, MD is the new director of the Harvard Catalyst Program for Postgraduate Education in Clinical and Translational Science. He will design and implement a comprehensive, integrated program of education, training, mentoring and career development for physicians, PhD scientists and other healthcare professionals involved in clinical and translational science. There will be the creation of an introductory course in clinical investigator training and greater integration of the rich array of advanced educational resources at Harvard into a multi-tiered education and career development program. The new program for physician and scientist training will be widely available throughout Harvard Catalyst and, ideally, will become a national model for educating physicians and scientists to become translational and clinical investigators.
• The imaging consortium will be involved in the development of this new post-graduate program:
  • Introduction to clinical investigator training will have a 1h introduction on imaging
  • Participation to the creation of a web-based catalogue of educational material. Our tutorial on MRI safety is a very good start. The members agreed that there is a need for a vetting process before posting material online.
• Regarding the training at RSNA in December, Slicer will be used as a teaching tool for quantitative biomarkers. Dr Macura (Johns Hopkins) sent Jeff some data and Ron and his team will work on the development of new sequences.

4. e-mail for Grand Rounds

• The consortium decided to contact the directors of the different radiology residency program to offer to give a talk on quantitative imaging during a Grand Round. An e-mail coming from the whole group should be send to the different institutions. Valerie will use the Catalyst template to create the body of the e-mail.
• The members will send their best material for quantitative imaging to Valerie who will collect them and share them with the rest of the group during the webex session on Tuesday July 28.
  • We want to demonstrate the biomarkers possibilities for clinical trial. US is a good example because it has been standardized in cardiovascular trials.

5. Informatics update

• Karl gave an update about the status of Medicus, the latest meeting of the BIRN cc, the creation of a working group on data management whose goal is to support internal data sharing as well as groups who wants to share data with the public.
• The University of Iowa is planning to do an XNAT integration for their CTSC.
• Yong set up 2 XNAT instances (CHB, MGH). Wendy and Mark will help for user support and training material.
• The informatics subgroup will evaluate how some modules from Spine can be inserted in XNAT.