The American College of Radiology is teaming up with the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine on a project to bring advanced imaging algorithms into routine practice, the pair announced Wednesday.
Quantitative imaging diagnostic and analytics tools will be made available to providers through the ACR Data Analysis and Research Toolkit, or DART, along with other platforms. And the ACR’s Center for Research and Innovation and Penn Medicine’s Center for Biomedical Imaging Computing & Analytics already have their first example.
The Cancer Imaging Phenomics Toolkit, or CaPTk, is a software platform that analyzes brain, breast and lung cancer images. Organizations can use CaPTk to quickly translate algorithms into routine quantification, analysis and reporting workflows. Ultimately, such projects will begin having a more direct impact on patient care, one Penn expert noted.
“Our goal in this collaboration is not only to make these computational tools more publicly available, but ultimately to leverage such synergies and the DART to be able to evaluate radiomics biomarkers, such as the ones enabled by CaPTk, in prospective oncologic clinical trials,” Despina Kontos, PhD, an associate professor of Radiology at Penn, said in an Oct. 14 statement.
Going forward, the pair plans to work with the federated tumor segmentation initiative, which is working to establish private multi-institutional projects on image analyses without sharing patient data.
“Data and tool-hosting platforms like DART play an important role in data processing and the radiomic, pathomic and genomic analysis used to develop AI algorithms and advance virtual clinical trials,” says Etta D. Pisano, MD, FACR, chief research officer of the ACR.
Matt joined Chicago’s TriMed team in 2018 covering all areas of health imaging after two years reporting on the hospital field. He holds a bachelor’s in English from UIC, and enjoys a good cup of coffee and an interesting documentary.