Page History

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The National Cancer Institute Clinical and Translational Imaging Informatics Project (NCI CTIIP) unites sub-projects from three imaging research domains--the digital pathology, co-clinical/small animal models, and molecular biology—with biology imaging research domains with the goal of creating an informatics platform and open source software tools. The specific goal of CTIIP is to generate a computer interface that applies the concept of data mashups to join The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) clinical and molecular data, The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) in-vivo imaging data, caMicroscope pathology data, a pilot set of animal model data, and relevant imaging annotation and markup data. Currently, these data repositories and types are burdened by a lack of interoperability due to the inconsistent use of or the lack of data standards. At the conclusion of this project, the resulting informatics infrastructure that each domain can share will provide researchers with analysis tools to directly mine data from multiple high-volume information repositories, creating a foundation for research and decision support systems to better diagnose and treat patients with cancer.

The three sub-projects, along with the solutions they provide, are discussed in this guide and listed below.

• Digital Pathology Data Integration and Integrated Query System
• Small Animal/Co-clinical Improved DICOM Compliance and Data Integration
• DICOM Working Group 30
• Pilot Challenges

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Digital Pathology

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and Integrated Query System

Digital pathology, unlike its more mature radiographic counterpart, has yet to standardize on a single storage and transport media. While DICOM has published a digital pathology standard, none of the major vendors in this space have adopted the standard.

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This sub-project addresses the lack of uniformly accepted standards within digital pathology and the simultaneous need for integration of pathology data with radiographic, genomic, and proteomic data.

Challenges Facing the Digital Pathology and Integrated Query System

Solution

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: Extending caMicroscope

The first step towards the goal of image data integration is the creation of an image server that can host and serve digital pathology images for any of the major vendors without recoding, which often introduces additional compression artifacts. This image server will be caMicroscope, with its functionality expanded by the OpenSlide library.

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