Informatics in radiology: An open-source and open-access cancer biomedical informatics grid annotation and image...

In a routine clinical environment or clinical trial, a case report form or structured reporting template can be used to quickly generate uniform and consistent reports. Annotation and image markup (AIM), a project supported by the National Cancer Institute's cancer biomedical informatics grid, can be used to collect information for a case report form or structured reporting template. AIM is designed to store, in a single information source, (a) the description of pixel data with use of markups or graphical drawings placed on the image, (b) calculation results (which may or may not be directly related to the markups), and (c) supplemental information. To facilitate the creation of AIM annotations with data entry templates, an AIM template schema and an open-source template creation application were developed to assist clinicians, image researchers, and designers of clinical trials to quickly create a set of data collection items, thereby ultimately making image information more readily accessible.