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Application Overview

Imaging-based cancer research is in the beginning phase of an integrative-biology revolution. It is now feasible to extract large sets of quantitative image features relevant to prognosis or treatment across three complementary research domains: in vivo clinical imaging, pre-clinical imaging, and digital pathology. These high-dimensional image feature sets can be used to infer clinical phenotypes or correlate with gene–protein signatures. This type of analysis, however, requires large volumes of image data. In this project, we propose to develop and deploy software that supports a comprehensive and reusable exploration and fusion of imaging, clinical, and molecular data. Within these three research domains, only one, clinical imaging, has made some progress in terms of establishing a framework and standards for informatics solutions. For pre-clinical imaging and digital pathology, there are no such standards that allow for the seamless viewing, integration, and analysis of disparate data sets to produce integrated views of the data, quantitative analysis, data integration, and research or clinical decision support systems.

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Some of the relevant, high-level takeaways from the workshop can be summarized as follows:

Standards

• The lack of standards in pre-clinical and pathology prevents the ability to share and leverage data across studies and institutions.
• There are differences between the domains, and therefore there should be careful consideration of where there are commonalities in semantic interoperability, and where there is not.

Community Engagement & Needs Identification

• Identify cross-NCI needs and gaps, and work with projects that represent both internal and broader community needs.
• Engaging the broader community is important, in order to gain consensus on needs and gaps. Working with professional societies is helpful in this regard.
• Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) may also be helpful partners.
• Keep the initial group working on a standards project small; use the wider community to validate and credential what is developed.

Incentivizing Adoption

• NCI should incorporate data sharing requirements into grants.
• NCI could create and fund projects that can only be successful if standards are utilized / developed (i.e., “pose questions that can only be answered through increased standardization”).

Strategy

The overarching goal of this project is to establish an informatics infrastructure that demonstrates the benefit and feasibility of data interoperability across the three domains: Genomics, Diagnostic Imaging, and Digital Pathology. The intent is to identify and address the interoperability needs to support specific research objectives, with the goal of demonstrating the need to scale up. The scope is limited to pilot data sets, and the intent is only to demonstrate the infrastructure. Creation of more robust tools that leverage the interoperability and infrastructure created in this project would be supported through extramural support after the benefit of scaling up has been demonstrated.

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CBIIT has worked extensively for several years in the area of data standards for both clinical research and healthcare, working with the community and Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), such as the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), Health Level 7 (HL7) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). From that work, EVS and caDSR are harmonized with the BRIDG, SDTM, and HL7 RIM models. Standardized Case Report Forms (CRFs), including those for imaging, have also been created. This work provides the bioinformatics foundation for semantic interoperability in digital pathology and co-clinical trials integrated with clinical and patient demographic data and data contained in TCIA / TCGA. 

Support

• Application Support email

Presentations, Demos and Other Materials

• caMicroscope Videos
• DataScope Video

Documentation and Training

• Digital Pathology and Integrative Query System Documentation
• Challenge Management System Documentation

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