CTSC:XNAT strategy meeting.072309

Strategy Meeting

Attendees

• Ron Kikinis
• Randy Gollub
• Steve Pieper
• Yong Gao
• Katie Hayes
• Mark Anderson
• Wendy Plesniak

Notes

• Discussed status of current XNAT implementations at CHB, MGH
  • Yong and Wendy have recently met with groups comprising the three use-cases (Brad Dickerson, Rudolph Pienaar, Simon Warfield)
    • have chosen concrete goals for a "Step I" in each ( Basic Data Management for retrospective data).
    • have established outcome metrics for each "Step I"
    • have a snapshot of the future goals of each use-case to guide future steps, & to feed back into XNAT implementation effort (Have a full description of Tractography workflow for Rudolph&Ellen's lab as a "Step II").
    • Wendy is documenting use cases
    • Wendy & Yong have gotten pointers to sample representative data from Brad & Rudolph
    • are working with them to describe the sample data and upload (Yong w/Brad, Wendy w/Rudolph)
• Ron would like to package as much information as required in order to facilitate easy deployment of CTSC informatics infrastructure at other sites:
  • Suggests thinking about an XNAT Appliance that consists of
    • appropriately configured machine(s)
    • installed XNAT database
    • installed web services
    • web service client tool(s) for transacting
  • Encourages that we formulate an XNAT Appliance description
• Yong discusses the difference between web GUI in XNAT 1.4 and current implementation, says it offers many improvements
• We briefly discuss feedback from use-cases about inadequacies of existing web GUI, especially in comparison to tools various clinical research groups are using, such as Osirix, Synapse, etc.
• Discussion of approach to setting up an XNAT instance at BWH
  • Mark Anderson and Katie Hayes will meet with system administration to allocate an appropriate machine, put it on the network, and if required, modify firewall
  • Yong advised on how to best configure the machine (linux-64, fedora) and on required packages for XNAT (cvs, etc?)
  • Mark and Katie will procede to set up the machine and Mark will walk thru XNAT instructions to create a BWH XNAT instance
  • Yong will provide advice as required.