Improving the Use of Imaging Biomarkers in Clinical Trials
One of the areas I spend time on is attending working groups and scientific meetings designed to improve the use of quantitative imaging biomarkers in clinical trials. One such group is the Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance (QIBA) that is organized by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Established in 2008, QIBA includes representatives from pharmaceutical companies, imaging equipment manufacturers, government agencies, professional societies and clinical trial centers.
The Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance has 3 main areas of development dealing with Volumetric CT, DCE-MRI and FDG-PET. The goal is to put together a roadmap of the steps necessary to obtain consistent and accurate quantitative outputs from these different imaging modalities that can be used initially in clinical trials and then eventually be developed for routine clinical practice. The recent RSNA two day imaging workshop held in April discussed standards for imaging endpoints in clinical trials.
As I wrote in an earlier blog post on the clinical ecosystem, a medical image consists of data pixels that are inherently quantitative, i.e. they can be reduced to electronic format and measured. The challenge is to ensure standardization and optimization of image acquisition so that the results are accurate and reproducible with minimal variation across patients and devices. In essence, turning imaging equipment into measuring devices.
There are ongoing efforts by industry groups such as QIBA to reduce variability and subjectivity of image interpretation. If you are interested in the workings of QIBA, their website has a lot of useful information on many areas in this field. I expect to be actively involved with working groups such as QIBA for some time to come. Are you involved with any such groups helping to improve the use of quantitative imaging biomarkers in clinical trials?
Sources:
- http://www.rsna.org/Research/qiba_intro.cfm
- http://www.rsna.org/
- http://www.rsna.org/Research/BiomarkerRoadmap.pdf
- http://www.rsna.org/snm/index.html
- http://jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/15/12/3507