Minutes meeting May 20, 2021 

Agenda

  • news and announcements
  • FUN2021 (Sept 7-9)
  • ITRUSST milestone day (Sept 10th)
  • educational course (Sept 14-16)
  • schedule for plenary meeting
  • working groups: updates, focus, and aims
  • planning group: modelling intercomparison

Summary

Every focus group gave an update with what has been done, what the short-term (~3 month) aims are, and what the longer-term 1 year aims are. The FUN2021 conference is also discussed. 

Attendance report (non-exhaustive)

  • Alexander Bystritsky
  • Andrew Thomas
  • Anton Fomenko
  • Apoutou N’Djin
  • Axel Thielscher
  • Benjamin Kop
  • Bradley Treeby
  • Charles Caskey
  • Colette Reniers
  • Cristina Pasquin
  • Ellen Bubrick
  • Elly Martin
  • Fidel Vila-Rodriguez
  • Ghazal Darmani
  • Jean-François Aubry
  • Jerome Sallet
  • Jesse van der Spek
  • John Snell
  • Keith Murpy
  • Kim Butts Pauly
  • Lennart Verhagen
  • Marcus Kaiser
  • Mark Schafer
  • Martin Monti
  • Mikhail Shapiro
  • Robert Chen
  • Robin Cleveland
  • Samuel Pichardo
  • Seung Schik Too
  • Sjoerd Meijer
  • Steffen Tretbar
  • Takahiro Osada
  • Til Ole Bergmann
  • Tulika Nandi

Meeting proceedings  

Lennart Verhagen: Elaborates on agenda points. Shows slides on FUN2021, consisting of a scientific symposium (September 7-9) with a deadline for talks on June 1 and a deadline for posters on August 1. See website: https://fun.web.ox.ac.uk/ . GatherTown will be used for poster sessions. Day 4 (sept 10) will consist of milestone reporting by all working groups, which will be live-streamed, recorded and publicly available.

The scientific symposium will be followed by 3 days (sept 14-16) of educational courses, for which everyone’s contribution is very much welcome. They will consist of pre-recorded videos, publicly available, with lectures and lab demonstrations. They will be live-streamed, including a Q&A during the course.

Kim Butts Pauly: Thanks, we are especially looking for volunteers to help in the educational courses. You can email me for this, and we can meet together. If you don’t have Kim’s email, you can contact Jesse, Colette or Lennart.

Lennart Verhagen: Let’s discuss our next meetings. June 17 will mainly cover updates from the safety group. July 15 will mainly cover updates from the planning group. The meeting on August 19 will probably be dropped due to summer holidays. The meeting on September 16 will be the last day of the educational course and will probably also be dropped.

Update focus groups

Jean-François Aubry (safety): 3 main goals for next 3 months: provide report on review of literature on TUS safety. Recommend metric for mechanical and thermal safety (with reporting & modeling focus groups). Recommend exclusion/inclusion criteria for healthy volunteers & patients (with clinical focus group). 1 year aims consist of making guidelines for mechanical and thermal safety. And making guidelines for exclusion/inclusion for healthy volunteers and patients.

Bradley Treeby (planning): What have we done so far? Started from two extremes: no subject-specific information (safety), and subject specific CT/MR (modelling). 3 month aims: 1. Complete phase 1 of modelling intercomparison; 2. Make recommendations for a thermal index relevant for TUS (with safety group); 3. Consensus around mapping images’ acoustic properties. 12 month aims: 1. Move on to next phases of modelling intercomparison (in one large doc right now); 2. Consensus / guidelines for thermal index.

Ellen Bubrick (clinical): We got stuck on understanding our role as compared to the safety group. As clinician-scientists we have to determine what is safe, which is different from using techniques safely as a researcher. We’ve had a great discussion with the safety group and our goal is much clearer now and we can move forward.

Lennart Verhagen (reporting): 3 months aims: recommendations for reporting ultrasound methods & protocols. Recommendations for reporting metrics relevant for safety. Recommendations for reporting secondary effects and adverse events. 1 year aims: guidelines for reporting ultrasound methods & protocols. Guidelines for reporting metrics relevant for safety. Guidelines and database for reporting secondary effects and adverse events.

Elly Martin (equipment): Guidance on characterization and consistency of equipment: ‘what comes out of the source is what you expect it to be’. Also, what information is needed to characterize output. Safe operation of equipment. 3 months aims: 1. hierarchy of equipment checks; 2. Guidance on performing regular consistency checks on equipment. 1 year aim: 1. Discussion/guidance on safe operation of equipment; 2. Information needed to define source for modelling purposes (with planning focus group).

Til Ole Bergmann (practice): 3 month aim is to have the first draft ready of the guide for new TUS users. 1 year goal is to publish the guide and have it more defined. No strict rules, but just a guide to help. Input from everyone is welcome, we want to put it on the ITRUSST website as well.

Benjamin Kop (open): We have acquired a creative commons license, which means that everything on the website requires attribution. We’re getting a liability statement with lawyers from Radboud University. We want more content on the website. I will send an instruction video on how to get your content from a doc to our GitHub. You can always contact us for help. Our 3 month goals are having our liability statement ready. Content should be more fleshed out and we want to refine the front-end of the website, and get website analytics. Our 1 year goal is to secure funding if necessary, settle on final repository infrastructure, increase visibility of the website, and get website analytics in accordance with GDPR. 

Lennart Verhagen: Let’s discuss our Milestone Day (September 10) of FUN2021. The idea is to show what each group has done and what our aims are. This will be recorded. We want to be open, and our goal is not to substitute any institutes or agencies, but to provide guidelines and advice from our expert group.
We will also publish a list on our website with everyone contributing to ITRUSST, the people part of focus groups (i.e. the ones having a vote). This will be done in the coming 3 months, and we will contact you to check details and give consent. We also have a lot of ‘observers’, because we appreciate input from everyone.

END OF MEETING