1st ETSI Hackathon event to be held in Vancouver, Canada, after 2023 IEEE NSS/MIC conference

June 2023

The first hackathon event of the Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI) is planned to be held in Vancouver, Canada, after the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference (4-11 November 2023). The exact date and site location will be announced soon. The event is co-organized by the ETSI data elements, container and use case subgroups. For more frequent updates, subscribe to ETSInitiative.org or visit directly the hackathon event page.

The primary objective of the 1st ETSI hackathon event is:

• to raise awareness and educate participants regarding the need for raw data standardization in nuclear medical imaging, the mission of ETSI, and the preliminary raw data format features, as well as
• to facilitate the implementation of a first set of validated code libraries, based on Yardl-generated code, thus demonstrating important basic use cases of the standardized data format

This event will focus on ETSI’s proposed PETSIRD standardized format for PET raw data. Nevertheless, the produced use case tools can become the basis for later developing respective use case tools for the standardized format of other types of emission tomography raw data such as SPECT and planar imaging raw data.

Examples of use cases of interest in this event include the extraction from the PET raw data of primary information and statistics (e.g. total counts, histograms, timing and energy info) as well as PET raw data convertors from proprietary vendor-specific or simulated data formats to the ETSI’s PETSIRD standardized format, thus enabling the smooth conversion of vendor-specific or simulated emission tomography raw data to the PETSIRD format as well as the reading, processing and writing of PETSIRD raw data using widely adopted in our research community open-source software platfromrs, such as the STIR and CASToR reconstruction libraries.

ETSI initiative is welcoming anyone interested to participate in its first hackathon event. This can be a unique opportunity to be among the very first to set the future standards for standardized, democratized and vendor-independent usage of open raw data in nuclear medicine and molecular imaging research community.

If you are interested or would like further information about ETSI’s first hackathon, please visit the event page or contact directly Kris Thielemans and Nicolas Karakatsanis.