Transforming Medical Imaging: The First SCAR TRIP™ Conference

The First Society for Computer Applications in Radiology (SCAR) Transforming the Radiological Interpretation Process (TRIP™) Conference and Workshop, “Transforming Medical Imaging” was held on January 31–February 1, 2005 in Bethesda, MD. Representatives from all areas of medical and scientific imaging—academia, research, industry, and government agencies—joined together to discuss the future of medical imaging and potential new ways to manage the explosion in numbers, size, and complexity of images generated by today's continually advancing imaging technologies. The two-day conference included plenary, scientific poster, and breakout sessions covering six major research areas related to TRIP™. These topic areas included human perception, image processing and computer-aided detection, data visualization, image set navigation and usability, databases and systems integration, and methodology evaluation and performance validation. The plenary presentations provided a general status review of each broad research field to use as a starting point for discussion in the breakout sessions, with emphasis on specific topics requiring further study. The goals for the breakout sessions were to define specific research questions in each topic area, to list the impediments to carrying out research in these fields, to suggest possible solutions and near- and distant-future directions for each general topic, and to report back to the general session. The scientific poster session provided another mechanism for presenting and discussing TRIP™-related research. This report summarizes each plenary and breakout session, and describes the group recommendations as to the issues facing the field, major impediments to progress, and the outlook for radiology in the short and long term. The conference helped refine the definition of the SCAR TRIP™ Initiative and the problems facing radiology with respect to the dramatic growth in medical imaging data, and it underscored a present and future need for the support of interdisciplinary translational research in radiology bridging bench-to-bedside. SCAR will continue to fund research grants exploring TRIP™ solutions. In addition, the organization proposes providing an infrastructure to foster collaborative research partnerships between SCAR corporate and academic members in the form of a TRIP™ Imaging Informatics Network (TRIPI²N).