Talk Title: AI for Medicine and Radiology on the NERC

Talk Abstract: The ChRIS project, a collaboration between BCH, Red Hat, and the MOC, aims to create an infrastructure that accelerates innovation and also unlocks new avenues of care. Unlike many similar systems that focus solely on research, ChRIS also integrates into existing clinical systems natively. This allows the results of complex analytics to be delivered to clinicians in the systems they are familiar with, bridging these two worlds.

In this talk, we will discuss challenges that motivated and continues to fuel this collaboration and show examples of medical analytics tools we have working on the New England Research Cloud (NERC) today. A complete ChRIS ecosystem is now available on NERC to enable cross-institutional collaboration and demonstrate how this can improve access to cutting edge care by under resourced hospitals/institutions. There is a tremendous need for analysis tools (whether straightforward image analysis or more complex AI), particularly in pediatrics where many rare disorders can best be tackled by a combined multi-institutional collaborations and bespoke analyses. Indeed, industry is often not interested in the pediatric space due to the small patient numbers. Our hope is to build a platform where researchers can easily deploy their unique analysis tools onto a cloud resource, where providers can start to pool ever growing data sets in a secure and regulatory conforming manner, and where the results of analyses are available to both clinicians and researchers.

We will show some actual running workflows of both clinical and research significance and demonstrate how this infrastructure can become an invaluable resource in medical computing.

HIPAA compliance would remove a key barrier to hospital engagement and greatly simplify medical data analysis. As we expand ChRIS on NERC, we look forward to engaging around HIPAA compliance and developing competitive business models that not only sustain support but also ensure continued growth and innovation.

Bios: Dr. Grant is the Käthe Beutler, MD Harvard Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She is also a clincial neuroradiologist, Director of Faculty Affairs for Radiology, Director of Research for the Maternal Fetal Care Center and founding Director of the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center (FNNDSC). The FNNDSC currently has over 70 members with 17 faculty and 7 postdoctoral students. Three modalities being developed in the Center are Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and quantitative Near Infrared Spectroscopy (qNIRS) with a focus on the fetus, placenta and neonate. Dr. Grant is a Senior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and sits on the Board of Scientific Counselors for National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In 2021 she received the Outstanding Contributions in Research Award from the American Society of Neuroradiology and in 2022 she received the Gold Medal Award from the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology. She is currently PI or lead PI of 6 major NIH grants.

Dr. Pienaar is the creator and main architect of ChRIS and an Assistant Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School. His background is more technical, coming from Electrical/Electronic and Biomedical Engineering, with focus on software and systems in scientific computing. At BCH he is a member of the Faculty Research Council, and is also involved in strategic planning with the Innovation Digital Health Accelerator. Externally, he is a member of the IEEE, ACM, as well as OHBM and has been invited lead editor on special editions of computing in medicine. He is also a contributing mentor for a graduate course on Advanced Cloud Computing offered jointly between BU and NEU and been actively involved in training interns and students across various aspects of biomedical computation ranging from more basic research to technical minutiae of high performance computing. He has been funded by various NIH projects and also several corporate sponsored research efforts, as well as BCH Foundational Radiology and BCH Technology Innovation Development funding.