CATI: A large instrument for muticenter neuroimaging

Abstract

CATI was born out of a consortium of neuroimaging research laboratories who have complementary expertise: NeuroSpin (the French high-field MR imaging center of the CEA) and four teams located in La Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital: ARAMIS and CENIR (the neuroimaging analysis research team and the neuroimaging platform of the Brain and Spine Institute), the Institute for Memory and Alzheimer's disease (IM2A) and LIB (an Inserm/UPMC unit focusing on research on functional imaging). These teams have been collaborating for several years, and in 2011, they were granted €9m by the French Alzheimer's disease initiative to create CATI – a national platform aiming to support multicenter neuroimaging studies. CATI's services cover the standardization of MRI and PET/SPECT data acquisitions, the data transfer to a centralized database, monitoring, quality control and image analysis. Initially designed to address Alzheimer's disease specific needs, the platform is now open to academic research projects and therapeutic trials targeting any neuropsychiatric disorder. CATI's core laboratories have many years of experience in the coordination of multi-site neuroimaging research. CATI's infrastructure stretches across the country, collecting additional know-how from all the French groups and organizations involved in neuroimaging, in order to offer the best tools for scientific projects. In agreement with the French societies of neuroradiology, radiology and nuclear medicine, CATI has been harmonizing imaging acquisitions across a network of over 40 French sites and this reach can be extended on demand. Twenty additional European sites will join the network from 2015. Although data accessibility policy is specifically chosen by the PI of each study, CATI nevertheless aims at making data sharing across studies easy and promotes it as much as possible. The platform is already in charge of the imaging protocols of more than thirty large French multicenter studies, including several therapeutic trials and the Memento cohort of the French Alzheimer initiative. Three European projects are also relying on the platform from 2015. In the context of Memento, which images 2300 subjects with isolated memory complaints or mild cognitive impairment, CATI is closely linked with the French network of memory centers in charge of recruiting Alzheimer's disease patients. Nevertheless, CATI is also involved in projects focusing on other neuropsychiatric disorders. CATI embeds a team of MRI and PET physicists, engineers and researchers in charge of standardizing acquisitions, and monitoring MRI and PET scanners within the CATI network. The Keosys Company deals with the secure transfer of imaging data to the CATI central database through a web service that is accessible from imaging acquisition sites. A team of research assistants performs quality control of the incoming raw datasets. For data analysis, CATI provides broad expertise in image processing and statistical meta-analysis tools, which are operated by engineers and technicians. CATI can provide assistance at any stage of the study and will perform additional imaging harmonization or dedicated algorithmic R&D according to requests from new facilities.