Facilities
DePaul University
The Intelligent Multimedia Processing (IMP) Laboratory will host the project activities at the School of Computer Science, Information Systems and Telecommunications (CTI). The CTI research laboratory has seven faculty members and a mission focused on medical imaging, image processing, computer vision, content-based multimedia retrieval, data analysis and data mining. The goal is to develop both the theory and the tools for real world applications from various domains. There are around 10 students performing research in the lab every year. The IMP lab facilities include six high-end workstations boasting Intel P4 processors at 3.2 GHz and having large amounts of memory (1GB ~ 2GB).
The Medical Imaging Informatics (MedIX) laboratory houses eight workstations providing workspace for eight-full-time students. The MedIX workstations have the latest P4 3.2 GHz HT processors 1GB of DDR each.
Both labs are equipped with image processing and statistical software to enable the proposed studies. Prototyping of image processing algorithms will be done on MatLab; statistical analyses will be conducted in MatLab and SPSS. Machine learning and data mining algorithms will be implemented in MatLab and AnswerTree. The open source will be developed in C#. The labs are also equipped with a small library of relevant texts.
The IMP and MedIX labs are located at DePaul University and thus benefit from the Universitiy’s extensive internal networking support, including wireless ports throughout the university. DePaul has an Internet2 high-speed connection for conducting research, and the library has considerable holdings online. Faculty and staff also have access to any of the University’s many public labs.
University of Chicago
Laboratory: The Radiology Imaging Research Institute located in the Department of Radiology at the University of Chicago will be the facility for the proposed research. The laboratories for x-ray imaging have over 30 faculty and staff members with 14,000 square-feet of recently renovated laboratory space. The facility includes two dedicated computer rooms, seven laboratories (one psychophysics with two rooms dedicated for observer performance studies, one film digitization, one scientific computing and visualization, three digital image processing), three x-ray rooms (containing five x-ray generators and seven x-ray tubes, including a Fischer digital stereotactic system and a Faxitron DX20), one darkroom, and three conference rooms. We have in the laboratory a R2 Technology, Inc, ImageChecker 1000 system modified so that we can archive the digitized images and we have access to a file that contains the x-y location and lesion type of all computer detections.
Clinical: The Radiology Department has 47 attending radiologists, 7 fellows, and 24 residents. There are 6 radiologists and 1 fellow performing breast imaging. Over 18,000 mammographic examinations are performed each year in the department. The department has three dedicated mammographic imaging units, one digital stereotactic breast needle biopsy unit, one breast ultrasound unit, two GE full-field digital mammography (FFDM) system, and a FujiFilm CR system for mammography.
Computer: Computer workstations include: 16 SGI workstations, 5 SUN Ultrasparc workstations, and 20 Dell or equivalent workstations running Linux operating system. Each computer has at least 40 Gbytes of disk space on average with data backup done centrally. There are 3 Apple Macintosh computers in the laboratories and one Apple Macintosh computer in each investigator's office. All workstations are connected via high-speed Internet. The Department of Radiology facilities include a Silicon Graphics Power Onyx (R10,000 6 processors) with an Immersadesk and 500 Gbytes of disk space.
The Rossmann Laboratories have a Silicon Graphics Power Onyx (R10,000 multi-processors) that contains four 200 MHz processors with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and 140 gigabytes of hard disk space. The graphics hardware on the Onyx operates an Immersadesk for display of volume-rendered, virtual reality representations of CT data sets and computer detection output. For image display, the Rossmann Laboratories have three 1k x 1k Imlogix CRT monitors, four 2k x 2k Megascan CRT monitors, six Seikosha gray-scale paper printers, two Konica laser film printers (2k x 2K), one Konica high-quality laser film printer (4k x 5K), and one Kodak high-quality laser film printer.
Northwestern University
The Department of Radiology’s Imaging Informatics Section will host the student activities at Northwestern University Medical School; it operates a 4000 square foot research laboratory. There are four full-time technical staff. There are usually about 8 students as part of the lab at any given time. The section operates, for experimental purposes, a small open source PACS that is connected through automatic de-identification to the clinical PACS at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. This environment includes several high-resolution diagnostic imaging workstations for research use. This test system can receive test HL7 and test DICOM traffic as part of the hospital’s larger test environment. The section is responsible for upkeep of almost 100 personal computers. The section also operates a large UNIX server and four smaller Windows NT servers that provide web, ftp, mail, and other services to the department.
Through the Feinberg School of Medicine, the laboratory has access to the Galter Medical Library which is completely equipped for full-text access to the medical literature. NMH is the primary teaching affiliate of Northwestern University Medical School. The Department of Radiology operates a large GE Medical Systems PACS to provide a film-less environment. The Radiology Department performs 400,000 procedures per year, of which 95% are stored, transmitted, displayed and interpreted on the PACS. The system now contains over 3,000,000 studies containing over 150,000,000 images.
The Radiology Department currently hosts 40 faculty radiologists and 26 residents. The Department has 17 computed radiography (CR) units, 8 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners (including 2 units dedicated to research operations), 6 CT scanners (of which 5 are multi-detector, spiral CT), 5 bi-plane, angiography units, 6 fluoroscopy units, 1 digital panorex, 1 PET scanner and 1 full-field digital mammography unit, all of which are connected to the PACS. There are 27 diagnostic imaging workstations in the department and another 67 throughout the rest of the facility.