In Vivo Imaging Workspace Annotations Imaging Markup Development Project
BACKGROUND
The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG, is an informatics infrastructure
that will connect teams of clinical and basic cancer and biomedical researchers together
to enable them to better develop and share tools and data in an open environment with
common standards. caBIG will create a voluntary virtual network (or grid) that links
individuals and institutions both nationally and internationally, effectively forming a
World Wide Web of cancer research. caBIG will allow researchers to answer research
questions more rapidly and efficiently, thereby promising to accelerate progress in all
aspects of cancer research from etiologic research to prevention, early detection and
treatment. Ultimately, because caBIG will provide a common unifying force that
facilitates progress in cancer research, the most important beneficiaries will be cancer
patients and the public at large.
Key to the success of caBIG is the development of solutions that are both semantically
and syntactically inter-operable. This includes solutions newly developed for caBIG
as well as existing commercial and locally developed applications. This involves the
development of common models for Imaging Workspace areas of interest, agreement
on a robust set of computable data types and terminology standards, and the
development and/or adoption of messaging standards, interchange formats and
common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). By providing a set of semantically
and syntactically interoperable tools, the caBIG Imaging Workspace project will
ultimately provide the cancer research community with more choices, and a move
towards modular and interoperable software architecture. Development of these
solutions will be based on key needs and priorities identified by the Institute
community and will be developed, tested and validated by Institutions participating in
the caBIG initiative.
In vivo imaging is an essential component of basic and clinical cancer research. The
caBIG in vivo Imaging Workspace is intended to advance imaging informatics by
focusing on creating, optimizing, and validating software tools and modeling methods
to extract meaning from in vivo imaging data and thereby improving outcomes for
patients with cancer or pre-cancer. As a necessary pre-condition for this, the
participants in this workspace are also actively engaged in promulgating, maintaining,
refining, and evolving interoperable in vivo imaging informatics data standards (e.g.,
DICOM, HL-7, C-DISK) to ensure availability of imaging data to the research and
clinical communities.
The purpose of this project is to develop a standard for medical image annotation
and markup. While the primary focus is on the use of this standard in the
markup and annotation of images used in the research space, and in particular,
the image based cancer clinical trial, the standard must be suitable for use in the
annotation and markup of all medical images used for clinical and other research
tasks. The project requires the delivery of a small number of sample instances of
annotations and markups, a transcoding software application that also validates
the compliance with the AIM standard and a reference implementation of an
authoring and rendering software module suitable for integration with the caBIG
Imaging Workspaces eXtensible Imaging Platform (XIP) project.
