The National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Cancer Institute (NCI) is addressing some of the most critical informatics challenges in the research and clinical trials communities via the "cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid" (caBIG™) program.

caBIG™ is designed to use grid computing to interconnect approximately 50 clinical cancer centers via common protocols, standards, and commonly adopted free and open source software. The ultimate goal of this project is to achieve online access to data from cancer centers and other facilities across the world using grid technology. This will permit researchers and clinicians to personalize care of a cancer patient based on that patient’s DNA make-up, tumor DNA and proteomic data, pharmacokinetic data, and anatomic and functional imaging data.

The NCI recognizes that imaging informatics is a crucial part of the research and clinical trials communities and thus is an important part of the caBIG™ program. Real solutions are being developed within the caBIG™ program’s Imaging Workspace. The Imaging Workspace is built on the input of imaging informatics experts and a larger community of multiple related disciplines from all across the country. In the two years since its inception, this workspace has focused on the development of tools to facilitate standardization and interoperability, and is now on the cusp of promoting adoption activities via its close ties to image based cooperative groups.

The caBIG™ Imaging Workspace’s presence at the SIIM 2008 Annual Meeting will display the workspace’s achievements and level of maturity through the following ongoing demos:

• “EXtensible Imaging Platform” (XIP)

• “Imaging Core Middleware”

• “National Cancer Imaging Archive” (NCIA)

• “Annotations and Imaging Markup” (AIM) developer tools.

The following projects presentations will also be included: