Minutes Meeting January 21, 2021

Agenda

  • Organization-level considerations: name of consortium, consensus protocol, quorum

  • Update from focus groups 

  • Next meetings 

Summary

In this meeting we tentatively decided on TRUSST as the name for this consortium via an democratic vote. We discussed how voting would work in TRUSST, with the current status being that labs/organizations will receive one vote unless individual members specifically request having their own individual vote. In essence, voting members are actively contributing members. If an ECR falls under that description, then they also have a vote. We received updates from a number of working groups, and it seems TRUSST is making some good progress. Lennart will send out a poll to confirm a day/time for our monthly TRUSST-wide meetings. 

Attendance report (non-exhaustive)

  • Brad Treeby 
  • Elly Martin 
  • Hartwig Siebner 
  • Jean-François Aubry 
  • Lennart Verhagen 
  • Mikhail Shapiro 
  • Robert Chen 
  • Samuel Pichardo 
  • Til Ole Bergmann 

Meeting proceedings

Lennart Verhagen: in this meeting we will discuss the planning of future meetings, decide on a name for this collaboration, and receive updates from a number of working groups on their progress. 

Lennart Verhagen: collated a number of proposed names. An initial vote was conducted to reduce the number of candidate names to five. Another vote was conducted to determine the top two names, and then one additional final vote to determine the ultimate name. We have settled on TRUSST. Now that our name is secure, we will move on to setting up a Gitlab repository, a Slack group, and so on. 

Voting in TRUSST (now ITRUSST)
We can vote during zoom meetings using polls, or we can use a secure online voting tool that does not require presence at the meeting. More support was heard for the latter. In terms of how votes are distributed, Lennart proposed that each lab/organization has one vote, so as not to bias votes in the case that a given lab has multiple members in the consortium. It was mentioned that giving one vote per lab may suppress the voice of ECRs. To account for this, the standard will be that each lab/organization has one vote, but each member is still free to request their own vote if they prefer. 

Hartwig Siebner: expressed that it is important that votes not be binary. In response, Lennart highlighted a number of solutions, including having proposals/votes be set in stages, or having clear opinion sections for which consensus agreement is not required. 

Lennart Verhagen: it is only when we reach the stage where we are considering standardization or adopting some of our concepts that TRUSST needs to reach consensus as a whole. Given that we will use the internet to host some of our content, even when consensus is not reached, work can be published as long as we are transparent about the state of consensus. Here, consensus has been proposed to be a minimum of 70% agreement across TRUSST. 

Jean-François Aubry: when voting for consensus, who will be permitted to vote? This question ties back into the impact of participating ECRs. Lennart responded by highlighting active participation in individual working groups (e.g., the safety working group). The proposal is that voting members are active members, meaning that are actively participating and contributing in one of the working groups. If an ECR fulfills that description, then they are permitted a vote as well. 

Update focus groups

Brad Treeby (Planning working group): a number of meetings have already been done by the planning working group. They brought in people from the community involved in transcranial modelling, some of which were not yet members of TRUSST. The planning working group is working on  a summary document that captures what researchers in the field are currently doing in terms of skull imaging (e.g., which parameters to use and why). In one meeting, they had a CT expert come in and speak about the in’s and out’s of CT. 

Jean-François Aubry (Safety working group): the safety working group has made a number of subcommittees with appointed leaders in charge of different goals. Anton Fomeko and Robert (Chen) were designated to committees in their absence so their roles will need to be confirmed. Seung-Schik Yoo added that these subcommittees are meeting biweekly to keep up momentum. 

Lennart Verhagen: on the Clinical working group, Chris Butler was unable to attend the current meeting. The clinical working group has met and are currently still working on defining their goals. He has put out a request for what we as TRUSST would like the clinical working group to achieve. This working group is also still looking for members. If anyone is interested in joining the clinical working group they can contact Chris Butler or Lennart. 

Til Ole Bergmann (Practice working group): the practice working group has met twice now. After some brainstorming on their goals, their plan is to provide a guide for new users consisting of resources and advice. Rather athan providing strong guidelines, they will provide more of a ‘how to get started guide’ with the goal to provide information and resources that will facilitate the establishment of new labs. Til had four points he wanted to discuss with TRUSST as a whole.

  1. What is the purpose and target audience for such a guide? He proposed that it would be mainly targeted at starting labs that do not have a strong/established background in focused ultrasound yet. 

  2. What format should the guide be? He proposes that it should not start off as a paper or publication but rather a web-based format where the group can provide different resources in multiple media formats (e.g., including videos). The idea is for the guide to be a basic introduction to everything one needs to know that links to more detailed descriptions which will naturally be provided by the other working groups (e.g., the guide would address the basics of simulations but then refer to the simulation working groups content for more detailed information). 

  3. How should the guide be published? This begs the question of how we should go about disseminating the outcome of not only the practice working group, but the other working groups as well. A web-based approach is good because content can be adapted over time, but it would be good for content to be linked to a publication to improve visibility. At the same time, we do not want to fasten our recommendations into place. Maybe something like an opinion paper would work. This publication could reference online web pages that can be updated as time goes by. 

  4. To what extent do we want to include research on animals/humans into the same guide? 

Lennart Verhagen:

  1. The target group is indeed beginner labs. The core idea is to share know-how and insight from expert labs. Til highlights here that the Practice working group would still be keeping their content at a relatively superficial level and then referencing outcomes from other working groups. The core of this guide would then be helping researchers know what they need to know and where to learn more. 

  2. A web-based format to begin with works. We can create citable snapshots with doi’s for the webpages to help with visibility and accessibility. 

  3. When it comes to dissemination there is some more work to do, which the Open working group will be working on as well. 

  4. This group initially got together because of the need for progress in human experiments, but a lot of us do have a background in animal experiments so Lennart was keen to hear others’ thoughts. 

Robert Chen: it should be a separate section for animal and human experiments. 

Samuel Pichardo: it would be helpful to hear procedures that other people have done which have not been fully reported in their papers, both for human and animal experiments. 

Mikhail Shapiro: mentions the importance of including species-specific considerations as subsections if there are members of TRUSST with the requisite knowledge. 

Til Ole Bergmann: highlights that there are few groups that will be conducting cross-species research concurrently. 

Lennart Verhagen: it would be valuable if we have both human and animal sections, but at the same time we can only do so much within reasonable time constraints. So, we need to prioritize which guide we would like to write first. For example, we could write it down as a goal to have animal and species-specific considerations, but that we do not need to have this guide by tomorrow. In other words, we need to define our goals but also clearly define our priorities. 

Til Ole Bergmann: takes home that there is also interest in a guide for animal models or even for specific species. The practice working group will discuss what to prioritize, and then reach out to experts when appropriate. 

Elly Martin (Equipment working group): the equipment working group has met once where they discussed what their scope would be in addition to a few initial aims. One of the main aims is to think about simple checks that researchers could do to make sure that their group and equipment is working consistently.They want to bear in mind what level of expertise people might have in terms of measurements of ultrasound, as well as available (measurement) equipment. For new labs and people with a neuroscience background who may have little technical expertise in this arena, the group would like to come up with a simple test to show whether equipment works the same one day as it did the last. Another goal the equipment group would like to work on is thinking about information provided by the system during use. For example, we could ask for users to provide their log files. We can ask the manufacturer for information about baseline output. This is especially important for users who are unable to characterize this themselves. Elly sees future collaboration with the reporting group, for example, when addressing the specification of what should be reporting and providing guidance for how people can obtain those values to be reported. Meetings will be held for this group on a biweekly basis.

Lennart Verhagen (Standardized reporting working group): no leaders/members of the standardized group were present during the meeting. Lennart will check in on this group’s progress.

Lennart Verhagen: It seems like TRUSST is gaining some momentum! He proposed we continue meeting with TRUSST as a whole once a month, and individual working groups can continue working at their own discretion. Lennart will send out a poll to set the day/time of our future monthly meetings.

END OF MEETING