Brainmap: CHRIS: A Web-based System for Medical Image Collection, Analysis, and Collaborative Sharing

Rudolph Pienaar, Ph.D.
Boston Childrens Hospital, Harvard Medical School
 
In this talk, I'll present a software system developed in our group at Boston Children's Hospital, called CHRIS. CHRIS is a novel web-based data storage and data processing workflow manager that provides strict data security while also facilitating secure, realtime interactive collaboration over the Internet and internal Intranets. Although CHRIS can manage any datatype, it is uniquely suited to medical image data, providing the ability to seamlessly collect data from typical sources found in hospitals (such as Picture Archive and Communications Systems, PACS), import from CDs/DVDs, users desktops, etc. CHRIS not only manages data collection and organization, but it also provides a large (and expanding) library of pipelines to analyze imported data (including FreeSurfer and Diffusion Toolkit). This library is easily extensible via a simple plugin mechanism, and CHRIS also provides the ability to directly interact with compute clusters for data analysis. Moreover, a wide variety of 2D, 3D, and 4D medical image data formats are natively supported and can be directly visualized and manipulated within the browser.
 
CHRIS also allows for realtime collaborative sharing and interaction with image data sets. Multiple users can connect concurrently to the same image, and as any one one user manipulates the image, all connected viewers respond similarly. Realtime text chat is also provided.
 
A clone of CHRIS is installed at the NMR center and I will also provide a quick overview of the CHRIS@NMR system. This cloned system schedules jobs on the 'launchpad' compute cluster.