On behalf of the IDEAS team, we wish you a very Happy New Year and a healthy and productive 2022!
While the past year has been challenging for many, it also highlighted the collective ability of scientists everywhere to adapt and make incredible progress and discoveries. We are hoping that 2022 will continue the march towards returning to normal, where our team can again work together in person much more.
Despite the tumultuous and uncertain times, the Health and Bioscience IDEAS team has had a busy 2021, and here are some of the highlights:
- July: we provided a lecture and collaborative project for the 2021 UCL Medical Image Computing Summer School (MedICSS). This content was focused on data management and reproducible image pipelines.
- September: in partnership with the XNAT Team, the Institute of Cancer Research, and Cancer Research UK’s National Cancer Imaging Translational Accelerator (NCITA), we co-organised XNAT Workshop 2021, a two-day virtual workshop on XNAT and wider topics around imaging data management and analytics. We had over 200 attendees, a fantastic interactive virtual poster session. All the videos of the day are online for you to catchup.
- September: we created an interactive tutorial entitled “Harmonisation strategies for multi-centre imaging studies”, for the DEMON network Early Career Research workshop network. It looked at why harmonisation for multi-site MRI studies is needed and presented some harmonisation strategies to use. You can try it yourself, without installing any software, as it was created using Binder
- October: we played around with Binder again to develop a cloud-based version of the pySuStain tutorial as part of SuStainFest 2021.
- December: we assisted at Regional Software London’s Python Software Carpentry course
In 2022, we will continue our mission to upskill researchers, clinicians and anybody interested in the analysis and management of medical imaging data. We have some exciting plans and ideas for our 2022 roadmap of activities and offerings, including:
- We are working on a new project, entitled “TeamCoders” that will provide a fun, inclusive, and collaborative project-based approach to learning imaging data science.
- Members of the team are organising the UCL MediCSS 2022 Summer School with delegates from all over the world. IDEAS will continue to provide some lectures and projects for the Summer School.
- Organise and teach at Software Carpentries events at UCL and London wide.
- Design and deliver hands-on workshops that we plan to present at conferences, hopefully at in-person events this year.
- Organise the in-person 2022 XNAT workshop in London.
- Create short courses around bioscience and medical image processing for all interested researchers.
- Continue our work on developing reproducible content via the cloud that makes it easier for all people to learn these concepts regardless of their local software environment, so there are fewer technical glitches.
- Expand our public engagements programme.
We hope you will find these activities interesting and worthwhile and contribute to a positive 2022.
-Dave Cash and Mary Tziraki
