Clinical trials are increasingly relying on advanced imaging methods for subject enrollment and to evaluate endpoints. Dr. Jaffray saw the need for quality data collection and management in an area where technology is quickly evolving. With funding from the OICR and CFI, Dr. Jaffray built the Quantitative Imaging for Personalized Cancer Medicine (QIPCM) program, a multidisciplinary team of physicists, oncologists, IT specialists and analysts—all with extensive imaging expertise—to solve the problems faced by clinical investigators.
QIPCM program provides services and tools to support the acquisition of robust imaging data from multi-centre clinical trials, including scanner validation and QA, imaging protocol development, novel image analysis tools development, image analysis, storage, archival and remote image review.
“Everything is about quality—quality assurance of the scanners and the data, robust anonymization and data handling, and expert analysis of the data using transparent, reproducible standards and tools,” says Dr. Ivan Yeung, QIPCM’s physics lead.
When new imaging methods are discovered and software for extracting quantitative metrics relevant to trials is developed, Techna can help rapidly translate those developments into practice, using QIPCM as part of a rapid translation pipeline for quantitative imaging methods. QIPCM can help clinical trials access and make good use of these cutting-edge techniques as soon as they are available. This knowledge-translation-as-a-service approach cuts out potential years of delay and learning curves between physics innovations and clinical trial implementations by working in close cooperation with experts in imaging and technology translation—often the very people who are inventing the techniques in the first place.
To date 22 trials have used the QIPCM platform, representing over 2.3 million images from 770 medical imaging studies.