2023-08-02 MITI Governance Board Meeting

Meeting attendees

Attendees: Adam Taylor, Allison Maier, Catherine Luria, Denis Shapiro, Jeremy Muhlich, Sabrina Chan, Sarah Arena, Sean Erickson

Agenda and Discussion

Presentation by Sabrina Chan, “Clinical and Biospecimen Metadata Standards in MITI”

  • Use case: Trying to implement MITI within LIMS system; insufficient clinical metadata per specific cancer type
  • Adding disease-specific clinical/biospecimen based on College of American Pathologists, HTAN, and TCGA standards

    Reducing required fields in MITI

    -   How can we narrow down MITI fields to have a core set of metadata? And then supplement with disease, experiment, or other domain-specific metadata?

-   Tracking from excision onwards. We don’t want to re-create clinical metadata standards. What needs to travel with the imaging data to make analysis possible?

-   Core components of clinical MITI: demographic, diagnosis

-   Remove disease/domain-specific information from basic patient information

-   Implement a hierarchy/decision tree: If normal tissue, do this. If cancer, do this. If specific cancer, do this.

-   Provide examples of how to use/implement MITI: provide examples from NCI HTAN and Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology for how to actually implement.

-   Collect other use cases to highlight on the website/at meetings

-   Document which ontologies lists came from and then automate updates. Maintaining the list/copy within MITI likely makes sense for validating values.

Handling time-based information, multiple events

  • Event-based information: Currently only one field to enter date. -   Differentiate enduring information about a patient vs diagnosis/event-specific information. Could implement using a nested structure.

Board election

  • Post election announcement in September and collect nominations for a month (close in October)
  • Define clear roles/board structure (Community outreach, Meeting scheduling, Technical, Clinical/Biological, Consortia/Standards, Industry).

Meeting regularity

  • Next meeting will be in early September. Prospective board members should be encouraged to attend. -   Aim to host community meetings in addition to board meetings to encourage more community engagement. Community meetings could have more in-depth discussions of specific fields and implementations.