In Vivo Imaging (IMAG) Newcomer Information

Mission and Goals

In Vivo Imaging––from the molecular level to small animal imaging to clinical imaging of patients––is an essential component of basic and clinical cancer research. The caBIG™ In Vivo Imaging Workspace will focus on identifying the ways in which the wealth of information provided by such imaging, performed at academic and other research centers across the country, can be shared, optimized, and most effectively integrated into the ongoing effort to relieve suffering and death from cancer.

The In Vivo Imaging Workspace was launched during the first week of October 2005, and the opportunity for participation remains open. Initial efforts will involve enlisting the widest possible representation from cancer centers, industry, organizations, and standards-setting groups. Among the earliest of the cooperative workspace tasks will be the identification of overall aims and the most urgent challenges in cancer imaging and sharing of data. The workspace will define the needs for and participate in creating, optimizing, and validating tools and methods to extract meaning from in vivo imaging data. In this process, participants will also be actively engaged in defining, refining, and evolving interoperable in vivo imaging informatics data standards. The in vivo imaging technologies and modalities addressed will include systems for research and clinical imaging of live patients and animals (including single-cell organisms) used as model systems for human disease.

Additional overview materials:

• Introduction to Imaging in the caBIG™ Program (Annual Meeting in April 2007)
• Imaging general overview from the January 2008 DSIC Face-to-Face

You can see who is involved in this workspace on the list of  In Vivo Imaging Participating Organizations.

How It Operates

This workspace welcomes participation in the workspace and SIG activities from individuals interested in the workspace mission and goals. Participant activities include attending regular teleconferences and periodic face-to-face meetings, commenting on products under development or review and conducting more in-depth work in pursuit of workspace objectives. Anyone with an interest in the activities of this workspace is welcome to attend teleconferences and sign up for the listserv.

If you are interested in learning more you can join the next teleconference by emailing the workspace lead to get the toll free dial-in number and access code. The IMAG Contact Information section provides contact information for both the workspace and SIG leads.

Teleconferences: Workspace participants meet regularly via teleconference to discuss issues and devise solutions. The IMAG WS meetings are held monthly and listed on the Schedule. To see what the Imaging WS has been working on recently, you can review the Meeting Notes from past teleconferences.

Listserv: Between teleconferences the NIH IMAG Listserv is the primary means of collaboration for participants. Discussions, teleconference agendas and dial-in information as well as cancellations are sent out on the listserv on the so signing up is a good way to keep up-to-date.

Face to Face Meetings: In addition to the teleconferences the DSIC workspace gathers for face-to-face meetings periodically over the course of the year. These meetings provide the opportunity for members to tackle specific issues that are best accomplished together in real time, receive updates, discuss accomplishments, upcoming tasks and future goals. These are announced in What's BIG This Week and distributed through the caBIG™ Announce Listserv.

Working groups and SIGs: The IMAG Workspace previously had several Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which addressed specific needs. To view archived materials visit their individual pages.

• Small Animal SIG - Concerned with operational requirements and procedures for caBIG™ integration of relevant small animal medical imaging commercial software systems.
• Software SIG - Creating and adapting open source software tools that can make use of the caBIG™ grid infrastructure to retrieve images and information from a distributed database.
• Standards and Interoperability (SIO) SIG - Exploring the needs of the image based clinical trials community, identify gaps in meeting these needs by existing standards and practices, and foster the development of informatics tools to fill these gaps.
• Testbed SIG - Creating mark up/annotation of images for humans reviewing co-op group studies, comparison of human/computer detection, and metadata/object model representation. Facilitating interoperability of MIRC, IHE, DICOM, caGrid, and HL7, and evaluating CAD & Employ/Image Quantification (IQ) for Co-Op Groups support, (QARC), and radiation dose quantification.
• Vocabulary and Common Data Elements (VCDE) SIG - Promoting, supporing, developing, and evaluating standards-based vocabularies, ontologies, and CDEs for radiology and allied imaging fields.

What have they done (products)

The list below shows the informatics systems and tools produced by the IMAG Workspace that are ready for use by the cancer research community. These systems and tools are interoperable, modular, validated, open source, and freely available. In addition, the NCICB Applications Support provides technical support for caBIG™tools via several mechanisms (phone, email, web form) and many of these tools have supporting training modules in the Access caBIG™ Training section..

• caIMAGE
  
  A cancer images database maintained by NCI. Investigators can register on the site, and then search for and submit images to the online image repository using a web browser. caIMAGE utilizes anatomy and disease vocabularies served by the NCI Thesaurus, a knowledgebase containing the working vocabularies for clinical, translational and basic research used in NCI data systems.
• National Cancer Imaging Archive (NCIA) Application 
  This archive provides access to images to support:
  • development and validation of analytical software for lesion detection and classification,
  • accelerated diagnostic imaging decision making, and
  • quantitative imaging assessment of drug response.

To see a list of all caBIG™ tools, visit the Tools page