Re: Open-source MRI hardware initiative project
Hi,
I am a clinical with a special interest in cardiac MRI and part time community
manager (more or less) for GNUmed.
Am Saturday 09 April 2016, 16:19:35 schrieb Broche, Lionel:
> Hello Debian-Med team,
>
> I am a researcher in MRI hardware at the University of Aberdeen,
> Scotland. I am currently working on the development of a completely new
> type of MRI system (see ffc-mri.org), but I would like to avoid the
> traditional route of commercialisation as I see many problems with it.
> Instead, I have been thinking for a while of preparing an initiative for
> the development of open-source hardware in MRI.
>
If your primary goal is to facilitate research then I can see a point in
trying an open source model for advancing the technology. If you ever want to
see this installed in a hospital you will have to provide this through some
sort of company.
> The aim of this initiative would be, in a first stage, to pool the
> technical solutions already in the public domain together so as to help
> small research labs like mine and, in a second stage, to create a rally
> point for these labs to share knowledge, resources and to organise
> collective work.
Your field of interest is pretty distinct and I would envision you pretty much
know everyone else working on similar technology. It should be a fairly small
community. I guess everyone who is doing research on this is trying to get
visibility through peer-reviews publications or conference posters.
> If this proves successful, it may expand into a
> complete open source MRI hardware platform but that would be in the far
> future. I already approached several research groups who expressed their
> enthusiasm about this idea so there would be several academic
> participants to start with (at least 3, probably 5 to 8), and some of
> them are already willing to provide some designs.
>
That is what I had in mind when I wrote the above statements.
> I would like to get some advices from the Debian Med community regarding
> several aspects:
> - What solution would you think is the most appropriate to organise a
> community portal? I do not have any IT help from my University on this
> project but I am willing to put a bit of my own money to get a server
> somewhere if necessary. Bear in mind that I have little training on how
> to maintain a website, though I can take some time to learn.
I guess you would start with data collection. A Wiki such as Foswiki should
work for that. It is good for gathering content and caters for user
authentication. Besides textual content it will be fine to host images and
links to video material. No big server needed.
> - I know there is an active part of Debian Med that works on MRI
> software (and make great things, actually!), would any of them be
> interested in this initiative?
As Andreas has said before there is a difference between Debian med (pretty
much the people who package existing software) and Debian med users who are
sometimes the same people that write software.
Some of these people are subscribed to the Debian med mailing list and are
reading your messages.
See http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fninf.2012.00022/full for
people who might have interest in your research.
> If yes, what would you expect from it, or
> what would you be willing to provide at this stage?
Reaching potential users of your research could give you the right input to
focus. Where do you see the immediate value of your research for people
writing MRI related software. IMHO most software is about analyzing images
acquired by existing MRI devices. How would your technology help people reach
the clinical goal which is the reason for analyzing images ?
> Also, would you have
> some recommendations so that open-sourced MRI hardware would easily
> interface with the already existing open-source software?
I am afraid I don't fully understand what you mean. The people wrinting MRI
image/data analysis (in broad terms) software pretty much rely on you giving
them Dicom data. If you are referring to people who actually produce software
that interfaces with the MRI scanner itself I am not even sure there is any of
them on this list ( I hope I am wrong). This is usually the domain of the
scanner vendors.
> - Would you have any suggestions regarding the conduct of such a
> project? I have no experience in the management of open source projects
> and I am actively looking for documentation about it.
Don't take the scientific approach on this :-) Set up a website ( e.g. WIKI)
and invite people in your domain to contribute to it. What helps tremendously
is to organize a so called sprint. A gathering of like-minded people to
discuss your project and work on it in a friendly and non-rigid setting. This
is different from your usual conference where there is mostly talk without
much practical work.
> In particular, how
> can I organise this project so as to avoid bottlenecks in the future?
Worry about bottlenecks as they occur :-)
> - Can you see any funding bodies that could be interested in this
> initiative, in the short to medium term?
I know getting funded is a pain. There is the big money coming from EU
projects. But this is hard to get unless you have some professional grant
writers costing 10s of thousands of Euros.
If you are talking about getting the collaboraton issue funded then this is
not all that hard. For the first year you can get by with maybe 100 Euros for
hosting. Some people here on this list have organized coding sprints and can
comment how to organize and fund those.
You are part of a research lab. Maybe you can get some Wiki installed at your
Universitie's datacenter.
> - Do you know of organisations that would be interested to know of this
> project or to provide guidance?
I have no idea. However getting the collaboration part off the ground is not
that hard. Maybe there is a person among your collaborators who has experience
with project management.
> I already plan to contact OSHWA and the
> CERN Open Hardware Repository, but I am sure there would be others who
> can help.
While this is a good idea I can imagine you will do just fine by starting
small. Unless you expect to have a thousand of collaborators and Gigabytes of
data to share within a few weeks.
> - Where can I advertise this project efficiently? I am currently
> thinking about FOSDEM, if this sounds reasonable.
>
FOSDEM is a good idea. Start a blog, write about it. Learn from other
creators of open hardware such as mobilecq.hu
Sebastian
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