SPECTRA hosted a series of three workshops in November 10 – 12, 2021. We had 67 registrants, and 20-35 attendees at each session. A brief summary of each session included below. Each workshop is recorded, and available for viewing through the “Members Access” Portal.
Workshop 1: Joint space width analysis.
Kathryn Stok (University of Melbourne) led this session, which included an introduction to the published JSW analysis (10.21037/qims.2019.12.11) and available for installation by contacting Scanco. There was discussion about application of this algorithm in the context of image artifacts (e.g., stack boundary artifact, metal artifacts) as well as pathological features such as osteophytes. In addition, there was considerable interest in applying this algorithm to other joints (e.g., tibio-talar joint, knee joint). Finally, we discussed some of the needs to advance the use of this metric. Some needs include 1) development of a normative dataset, 2) determining the time period over which significant change may be observed, 3) determining the covariates (e.g., sex, age, height, weight) that may influence outcome, and 4) how to incorporate/account for luxation in our metrics.
Workshop 2: Erosion analysis
Stephanie Finzel (University of Freiburg) and Sarah Manske (University of Calgary) led this session. With the input of many SPECTRA members, we discussed the existing erosion analysis tools. These include manual measurement of erosions in common image viewing software platforms (e.g., Osirix) to custom analysis tools developed at Maastricht/Eindhoven, Erlangen, Calgary and Hong Kong. We discussed the relevance of image registration to ensure that baseline and follow-up measurements are occurring on images of erosions in the same orientation. One of the main topics of discussion was the current lack of availability of expert-labelled erosion data (i.e., where both the erosion locations and size have been evaluated by an expert reviewer). There was a lot of enthusiasm for generating a set of annotated/labelled data that could be then used to develop improved image analysis tools, and creating videos to educate users on the methodology.
Workshop 3: Future directions
Andrew Burghardt (University of California, San Francisco) led this workshop with the support of Lai-Shan Tam (Chinese University of Hong Kong). Serena Bonaretti (Transparent MSK Research) presented some of the progress she has made in terms of creating a database that could house information (i.e., meta data) about existing image datasets at various institutions. Such a database could also house key data sets that could be used for image analysis development, including annotations for scan/re-scan reliability, gold standards (e.g., comparison with histology or contrast-enhanced imaging), cross-sectional and longitudinal data. There was considerable discussion on suggestions to build permission to share datasets into IRB/ethics applications. We also discussed papers and key points that can help interest the rheumatology community in HR-pQCT research.
We finished off our session with a suggestion to develop several working groups focused on several avenues for SPECTRA-supported activities (e.g., data platform development, reference data development, erosion analysis). There was agreement that the virtual workshop format works reasonably well for our group, and that we will plan to hold future meetings this way in addition to workshops at traditional conference sessions.
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