Summary:

The TIES Cancer Research Network Face-To-Face Meeting was held at University of Pennsylvania on October 29, 2014, and provided a forum for interaction among Cancer Centers adopting and deploying TIES and collaborating through TCRN. More than 20 cancer center faculty and staff were present representing University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Georgia Regents University Cancer Center and University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Sessions included site updates from each cancer center, presentations from pilot projects seeking to use TCRN, the future of the TIES system, and Y2 project planning. For more information see the meeting agenda below and meeting notes.

Meeting Notes:

TIES Key Points and Action Items from TCRN Face to Face Meeting 10/29/14

Query Sharing and Development:

  1. We will develop a Query Blog at our SourceForge site that provides forum for users to post queriesto see what was done, why, and what problems they had
  2. We will make saved queries available to all users, not just people on the same study – enable network-wide sharing of queries

Additional Metadata:

  1. We will consider addition of lightweight metadata disclosing the fate of a sample (e.g. what assay was performed and who has the results)
  2. For each site, Pitt will help determine whether tagging things in their biorepository is needed.
  3. We will investigate how to provide a configurable way to tag consults so that users can exclude them if desired.

Deidentification:

  1. All sites will incorporate the de-identification scripts written by Mayur. Reports found by the scripts will be quarantined and reviewed.
  2. We will investigate alternatives to De-ID. There’s one developed by MITRE and University of Michigan that could provide an alternative.

Regulatory Compliance:

  1. We will determine with our OORs and IRBs if it’s possible to remove the requirement for an IRB for data preparatory to research (aggregate data).
  2. We will determine with our OORs and IRBs if it’s possible to eliminate the need for separate IRB protocols at each institution. Can we use multi-centered IRBs.
  3. We will determine with our OORs and IRBs if it’s possible to eliminate institutional signature on the AUA or provide some method for the institution to sign it electronically.
  4. Pitt team will start the process of the above recommendations with Pitt legal counsel to determine what’s possible first.
  5. Pitt team will discuss situation with NCI lawyer to determine if she can help us facilitate this.

Deployment at Cancer Centers:

  1. Train the trainer sessions will be held so each site knows how to train TIES/TCRN users.

Pilot Projects:

  1. We should tag all NMVB in TIES
  2. Rebecca and Mike will work on Papilloma– RadPath query and develop as Pilot Project.

Publications:

  1. Important to get publications out ASAP about our network and how it is set up including security and regulatory compliance.
  2. For our first publication JNCI was raised as a possibility. This has a very large cancer center readership and would be good for our Network and also for ITCR. This paper will be more cancer focused. Rebecca will draft an outline and assign parts to various people. We aim to submit this in early January.
  3. RPCI will consider working on a publication about DeidentificationQA which they have developed.
  4. We could also start work on an informatics paper about the network that is more technical, and related to the deployment and functioning of the network itself. Possibly for submission to JAMIA.

Whole slide imaging:

  1. If we do WSI, we should start with mesothelioma since they have all the images
  2. We should alsofocus on TMAs

Paraffin archive:

  1. Focus on block annotation and interface to LIMS systems to facilitate TMA creation
  2. Pitt team will create mockups for cohort identification to see if it’s useful/feasible

TCRN partner Priorities:

Based on ideas that surfaced during the meeting, request that the Pitt TIES team has received over the past year, and deliverables in the TCRN NCI U grant, each of the TCRN partnering sites adopting TIES was asked to prioritize the importance of the functionality items below. This information will be incorporated into our Y2 project plan.

1= very important for Y2

2 = somewhat important for Y2

3 = not very important for Y2

Feature / RPCI / GRU / PENN
Expose ConTEXT uncertainty in search / 2 / 2 / 3
Sharing queries across institutions / 1 / 1 / 2
Other report types / 2 / 3 / 1
RPCI de-id scripts in TIES / 1 / 1 / 1
Detailed data loading report / 1 / 1 / 2
Account lockout / 1 / 1 / 1
Ability to know quarantine status for complete result set (vs viewable) with an icon / 1 / 2 / 2
Template queries / 1 / 1 / 2
Option to remove outside consult cases from results / 2 / 2 / 1
Custom metadata assoc. with report (lightweight info. About fate of specimen) / 2 / 2 / 1
Block level annotation / 2 / 2 / 2
AD/LDAP integration / 3 / 1 / 1
Better/different de-identification / 3 / 1 / 2
WSI for TMAs / 3 / 2 / 3
Publicly accessible statistics about node/network / 3 / 3 / 3
TIES web service APIs / 2 / 1 / 1
Patient level visualization / 1 / 1 / 1
TIES Web 2.0 / 3 / 2 / 1