Piloting a web-based neuropathology image resource for the ADRC community

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The goal of the parent Emory Goizueta Disease Research Center (ADRC) is to provide support and facilitate the growth of clinicians and the clinical and research research activities for Alzheimer's disease and related disorders (ADRD). Central to this goal is the ability to freely distribute and share relevant data generated through these efforts. The National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC) facilitates these efforts, helping to harmonize clinical data from across individual ADRC sites. Neuropathologic evaluation of brain tissue is central to the diagnosis and staging of these diseases, but the histology data is not widely shared within this community. The increasing availability of whole slide imaging systems now makes data sharing feasible, although this is currently challenging. The lack of standard file formats, inconsistent naming schemas, image de-identification, and the enormous size of these images are ongoing challenges. We have developed the Digital Slide Archive (DSA) platform at Emory, which has been funded through a U24 and U01 grants from the NCI/NIH and has primarily been optimized for Cancer related image analysis workflows. Over the past year, as a proof of principle, we have collected image sets from six ADRC sites using the DSA platform. As described in this notice of special interest, numerous challenges remain to transform and harmonize heterogenous imaging data sets before they can be made AI/ML ready. In this proposal, we propose enhancing the DSA platform to support federating large neuropath imaging data sets. This will include developing a standardized data dictionary to describe slide level metadata, and tooling to facilitate data cleanup. We will also benchmark and optimize our analysis suite (HistomicsTK) on NP slide sides on local and cloud-based computational resources, and prepare tutorials demonstrating how our tools can be used for ADRD related image analysis tasks. These aims paired with the complementary and synergistic expertise of our informatics, pathology, and engineering will aid in development of robust, scalable, reliable, and sharable platforms to provide a foundation for innovative transformative science addressing a critical unmet need in neurodegenerative disease research.