As the new year begins, I wanted to catch up on some IDEAS activities from 2021. Perhaps the largest event that IDEAS was part of was the XNAT Workshop 2021, which took place on 13-14 September. If you are not familiar with XNAT, it is a great, flexible platform for storing, managing, and even analysing all different types of medical image data. We had originally planned to hold the XNAT workshop in-person in London, but sadly we decided it safest to meet virtually and postpoen the in-person event until 2022.
This year’s XNAT workshop brought together the global XNAT community, including developers, administrators, end users and everyone in between. We had keynote speakers, roundtable forums where experts talked about the biggest issues around management of imaging data, and town halls about how to take XNAT further forward. If you want to catch up, then you can find all of the videos from the above session at the workshop link above. We also had a fantastic interactive poster session using Spatial Chat. Provided there is space, you can go over to the virtual poster hall and check them out yourself.
Some personal highlights were:
- Dan Marcus, the leader of the XNAT team, talking about all the incredible new features in the latest version, XNAT 1.8, including the built-in OHIF viewer so that you can view and process the images online.
- Discussions between experts in the round tables about how platforms like XNAT can support large-scale machine learning tasks and navigating the interface between research and hosptial networks.
- Hearing about the future plans for the Container Service, which will allow for reproducible image analyis within XNAT.
- Spending time with friends and colleagues in the poster hall, discussing their work on XNAT.
–Dave Cash
