NCI Cancer Imaging Program Informatics Group
About the NCI CIP Informatics Group
Enter a few sentences to describe your group and its research:
In a nutshell, we provide informatics support for the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Imaging Program. We work on a variety of different projects that support CIP grantees and networks such as the Quantitative Imaging Network (QIN). However the most relevant work we do in the context of the XNAT workshop is probably our management of The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) - http://cancerimagingarchive.net.
TCIA is a free and open DICOM medical imaging archive. We've found that the conventional wisdom that nobody wants to share data is actually a huge misconception. People are more than willing to participate in an open culture of data sharing if the proper resources are made available to help them easily share their data in a safe and legal manner. For this reason our focus has been on providing an image archival service that helps with image curation and de-identification. Currently the primary archive software used by TCIA is the National Biomedical Imaging Archive (NBIA) but based on popular demand we will soon be adding XNAT as an additional interface for accessing our data. You can see a listing of our publicly available image collections and associated metadata at https://wiki.cancerimagingarchive.net/display/Public/Collections.
In addition to providing services related to archiving and serving up the actual image data we also spend substantial resources on enabling open ad-hoc research groups centered around the various data sets made available in TCIA. This includes hosting regular t-cons, helping identify and configure open source software solutions required by their research, identifying like-minded researchers who may wish to collaborate, etc. Examples of these can be found at https://wiki.cancerimagingarchive.net/display/Public/Research+Projects. Currently our largest focus in this area is supporting research teams analyzing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, which are looking for novel ways to link imaging biomarkers to genetics.
What brings you to the 2012 XNAT Workshop?
We are looking to learn as much as possible about how to manage XNAT and also any complimentary tools that people may have created which might make managing the aforementioned research projects easier. (extracting images from XNAT, visualizing/analyzing in a workstation, storing results in a query-able fashion, managing the workflow associated with these activities, etc)
What do you want to focus on while you're here?
Becoming an expert in creating and managing XNAT projects. In particular I'd like to focus on managing metadata that is associated with the image data. We have a number of image collections which currently contain rich metadata that is housed in spreadsheets, XML, and wiki pages that is not easy to search.
What are your hack-a-thon goals?
Deploy an XNAT instance with some proof of concept projects containing both image and metadata. I would like to leave the meeting knowing that once we've launched the real XNAT interface to TCIA we would have the necessary knowledge to be able to integrate it with our NBIA interface, as well as the structured metadata from our wiki.
Oh, and I would also like to drink some tasty St Louis craft beer with some of the other workshop attendees. If anyone reading this is a homebrewer and/or beer geek please find me while we're out there!