Surgical Planning LaboratoryBrigham and Women’s HospitalBoston, Massachusetts USA

a teaching affiliate ofHarvard Medical School

Open System Architecture for Image-Guided Therapy:

Goals of this Workshop

Randy Ellis, Ph.D.

©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 2

Reminder: Software is Expensive and Complex

• 31% were abandoned before delivery

• Over 57% were a minimum of 189%

over budget

Since then: overall, limited progress

WHY? Inherent complexity

Source: The Standish Group

An extensive 1994 study of thousands of US industrial projects found:

©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 3

Some Guiding Principles

• Open Source:

– Collaborative process

– Free to commercialization

• Robust:

– Can utilize existing infrastructure (e.g., NAMIC/Kitware)

– Automated testing of all changes

• Extensible:

– Expect to add new imaging modalities

– Expect new interventional procedures

©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 4

Workshop Goals

• Share our experiences in building IGT components systems

• Identify engineering infrastructure pieces that are:

– Missing and need to be built; or– Exist and need to be made [easily] available to the

community• Identify short and long term needs that

existing national centers (e.g., NCIGT and NA-MIC) can help address

• Identify industry-academic partnerships that would help accelerate research without compromising the industry partner's market advantage

• Raise awareness of the benefits of "Open" Source/Science/Interfaces

©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 5

Reminder: Human Genome Project

• Competing interests: USA academics, international academics, industry

• NIH: key in developing an open repository for sequences and subsequences

• Journals partnered: required deposition prior to publication

• Control Mechanism: “The Invisible Hand” (cf. Adam Smith, 1776)