Engineering:TCON 08 03 2006

Time for call: Thursday 3pm EST.

Attendees: Ron, Steve, Bill, Brendan, Wendy, Pat, Tina, Katie, Polina, Jags

Agenda

• By Ron: NA-MIC kit: How to make the NA-MIC kit more accessible for non-CS developers such as biomedical engineers and electrical engineers
  • Example Matlab: two advantages of Matlab in this context are the low barrier for getting going with small scripts and the fact that the notation is close to mathematical notation as taught in schools.
  • Example CORBA: Mike Vannier pointed me to an interesting article (see here). My conclusion after additional discussion with Mike Halle ("Just good enough to hack a work-around" ... have made the XML-based protocols just viable to set back the progress of efficient web services) is that we do not have to face many of the issues raised in this article with one significant exception: too much complexity.
  • It seems to me that we are trading-off maintainability and ease of getting going.
  • Could we develop a "NA-MIC starter kit" for new developers who are not CS (biomed engineers, EE etc. )?

Highlights

We had a general discussion about the different communities of users for the NA-MIC kit and what we need to do to make the kit easier to use for them. The two communities that were identified in addition to the clinical end user community that we target with Slicer, were:

• biomedical engineers, who would like to be able to write scripts around algorithms and create custom applications for their data
• computer scientists who need to to be able to rapidly create and test new algorithms using the building blocks of the kit

A few other points that were mentioned were:

• SPM as a case study on being the defacto standard for fmri analysis in the neuroscience community (SPM is a set of GPL'd scripts running on top of MATLAB).
• Chris John's group in Utah has been working on a visual programming language interface that might help the biomedical engineer community, but have has similar issues with the complexity of the underlying system. They have created "powerapps" that hide some of the system's complexity from end users.