Department of Biomedical Informatics, Emory University

About our group:

Dr. Gutman is an assistant professor of biomedical informatics, and also a practicing Psychiatrist.  Our group has been using XNAT extensively to manage some small projects being conducted in our group, and to facilitate a common spot for both imaging data, as well as metadata regarding subject participants.  The goal of my research is to develop methods to use large scale heterogenous data sets to mine for predictive biomarkers in gliomas (brain tumors), as well as in patients with PTSD (Post traumatic stress disorder).   Prior to joining the BMI department at Emory, Dr. Gutman completed his Psychiatry residency at Emory.  Since joining the department of comprehensive informatics (CCI) at Emory and the BMI Department, Dr. Gutman's research has primarily focused on brain tumors and the characterization and extraction of useful features.  

About our XNAT project(s):

Our current XNAT instance contains 14 Projects, 2887 Subjects, and 2860 Imaging Sessions.

Perhaps the most valued added in all of this has been the ability to tag and annotate image series based on their "Series Description".  For our glioma work, we have had to integrata data collected over many years from many Universities from many scanners.  As such, finding common data sets across all of these scanners is a huge challenge, as naming conventions vary and often multiple scans are replicated in the same series, making it difficult to programatically determine which scans are usable.   

Our goals for the XNAT Workshop:

Learn about anonymization scripts, upgrade path from 1.6.1 and "hack a thon"