Extensible open-source zero-footprint web viewer for oncologic imaging research

Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston MA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

? DESCRIPTION (provided by principal investigator): Managing the increasingly complex workflow and imaging analyses for oncology clinical trials to provide timely, protocol-compliant assessments requires sophisticated informatics tools. To address these issues, over the past 10 years the Tumor Imaging Metrics Core (TIMC), a CCSG Shared-Resource of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), has developed a software informatics system for managing the workflow and image measurements for oncology clinical trials. This system currently is in use across the 5 DF/HCC Harvard hospitals to manage over 600 active clinical trials, with 800 users, and has been licensed and implemented at several other Cancer Centers, including Yale, Utah/Huntsman Cancer Institute, and UW/Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The workflow management informatics system includes a web-application/database for protocol registration, order entry, work list management, reporting, and billing/administrative functions. However, the integrated, open-source image analysis platform is workstation-based and needs to be installed and updated on each computer where imaging measurements will be performed. Thus, the open- source imaging system is a limiting factor in deployment, requiring added IT desktop support and maintenance at each location where imaging assessments will be performed. The widespread adoption of this system across NCI Cancer Centers will be aided and facilitated by adapting the image analysis functionality into a web-based open-source platform. The current proposal is to 1) create a vendor-neutral, open-source, extensible, zero-footprint web-viewer and supporting server for display and analysis of DICOM images, and 2) create a plug-in architecture to allow us to replace our current open-source image workstation with this zero-footprint web-viewer for our TIMC clinical trials management system. In order to make the system broadly available to the oncology research community, in addition to developing an interface to our TIMC web-application, we will also implement an AIM (Annotation and Image Markup) interface so that caBIG investigators and other AIM framework research projects can integrate easily with our web-viewer. The viewer will meet all of the basic requirements for radiology tumor measurements specific to the needs of oncology clinical trials, yet also be flexible enough to be configured for user preferences and extended via plug-ins to support varied research workflows as a shared research resource. To achieve these design goals, the viewer and all of its functionality will be delivered to client machines exclusively through the web browser with nothing to install on client computers or mobile devices, which greatly simplifies and reduces the cost and support requirements of software deployments, and increases accessibility. The proposed viewer will enable researchers, imaging software developers, clinicians, and patients to access oncology clinical trials images in a freely availabl and openly extensible environment. This will facilitate remote image viewing and collaborative image consultations among a wide-range of imaging professionals. The web-DICOM viewer will be fully integrated with the TIMC clinical trials informatics management system so that both systems can be deployed across NCI Cancer Centers in a completely web-based implementation without desktop IT support. An AIM interface will also be provided so that the web-viewer can be integrated broadly across the caBIG/AIM cancer research community.