NCI's In-Vivo Imaging Informatics Working Group (IVI-WG) Comes to Stanford (9/9 & 9/10)

Posted 5:05 PM, August 26, 2008, by jaruiz

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) Imaging Workspace will be hosting its fall 2008 "Face-to-Face Meeting" at Stanford University this coming September 9th & 10th. Daniel Rubin, MD, MS, incoming assistant professor of radiology, is one of the leaders of the activities within the caBIG Imaging Workspace. He arranged to host this year's annual meeting at Stanford for the purpose of familiarizing members of the Radiology Department and the Cancer Center with the projects and opportunities provided by caBIG, which will enable translational research and clinical care.

The caBIG Program or "cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid" is an initiative by the National Cancer Institute designed to use grid computing to interconnect clinical cancer centers nationally via common protocols, standards, and commonly adopted free and open source software. The ultimate goal of this project is to increase the availability of online data from cancer centers and other facilities across the world using grid technology. This will permit researchers and clinicians to personalize the care of cancer patients and make targeted treatment decisions by providing them with access to their patients' DNA make-up; tumor DNA and proteomic data; pharmacokinetic data; and anatomic and functional imaging data.

The Imaging Workspace includes nationally-recognized participants engaged in cutting-edge imaging informatics work and is just one of several workspaces that composes the caBIG Program. In the two years since its inception, this Workspace has focused on the development of tools for standardization and interoperability; the annotation of images to enable data mining in massive image databases; and the integration of images with molecular and clinical data. The Imaging Workspace has recently begun to leverage these development efforts to promote adoption activities.

The upcoming "Face-to-Face Meeting" will provide attendees the opportunity to become familiar with the Workspace's tools during an "Open Floor Tool Demos" session, which will allow participants to use the tools and ask the application development teams any questions they may have about them. Additional topics of discussion include strategic planning for future Workspace projects; the prioritizing of external collaboration opportunities; and the steps the Imaging Workspace intends to take to harmonize its efforts with other workspaces in order to fully leverage the caBIG Program's resources to impact patient outcomes positively.