TIPS

Author : Mr. Wu Ruoyun
Last Updated : 1 October 2004

TIPS is a web-based database system storing Testing, Imaging, Pathological study, and Surgery data for clinical researchers. The system shares the information in a consistent and reliable fashion from a central server. The latest version 2.0 was released in April, 2004.

Objectives

The original motivation of developing TIPS is to manage various types of data collected for Robotics Prostate Biopsy (RPB) project. The ongoing RPB project has the following objectives:

	Given a patient group, to prove that Robotics Prostate Biopsy picks up higher percentage of patients with cancer than Manual biopsy does, with the same number of biopsy cores.
	Given a patient group, to prove that MRS guided Robotics Prostate Biopsy picks up higher percentage of patients with cancer than normal Robotics Prostate Biopsy does, with the same or less number of biopsy cores.

The data for RPB include information of patient particulars, PSA screening, medical imaging, prostate biopsy, pathological study, and complication. The current version of TIPS is catered for that purpose. As a supporting project for RPB, the TIPS also analyze the data stored, and calculate the percentage of patients with cancer for the three types of prostate biopsy method mentioned above, so that the comparison can be done easily at any time.

Why not file system or PACS

The previous approach of data storage is using normal file system. Strict folder/file naming protocol has to be followed. It has turned out to be an inflexible and confusing approach, especially when the number of experiment cases increase. There was no automatic program to search or analysis these data, too.

Commercial Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) provides medical picture storage, sharing, and viewing functions. However, as PACS is designed for managing pictures only, it is impossible to customize it to store data specific to prostate biopsy cases, such as biopsy result, PSA value, outlining on the images, case log, laser scan model, and complication. PACS is also too expensive for storing data of a single research project. Comparing with the commercial PACS system, our database is treats data in various formats simply as files, without inspecting the contents of these files. However, it is highly customized for the robotics prostate biopsy project, and much more cost effective for achieving the abovementioned objectives.

Why web-based database application

The database stores both the pictures and the data specific to prostate biopsy. The data are stored systematically, which makes automatic data analysing program possible. Database also allows us to develop sophisticated searching function, which is very helpful for the researchers to locate the data quickly when the number of experiment cases grows.

The web-based user interface will make data much easier to be accessed from various locations. The researchers will be able to view the critical non-binary data and data analysis report online, or download large binary files from the database, using a standard web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Data schema

The following data are maintained by the system for each patient. Some patient particulars, like date of birth, sex, and reference code, will also be maintained. The activities shown in the table below are all data required by the RPB project, and will be arranged chronologically for a patient.

Activity	Data Item	Contents
PSA Screening	Date	Date of screening
	Value	Prostate Specific Antigen value
	Remarks	Other information, like DRE finding
Imaging	Date	Date of imaging
	Type	Type of imaging (MRI, MRS, US, etc)
	Image	A ZIP file containing multiple TIFF files and a readme.txt. The readme.txt may record information like scanner model, image interval, zoom rate, etc.
	Outlining	A ZIP file containing files produced by Bubble 3D 2.0 with the prostate outlined by an expert. Can also contains a readme.txt to indicate information like who is the expert.
	Remarks	Other information
Biopsy	Date	Date of biopsy
	Cores	Number of biopsy cores
	Type	Type of biopsy (Manual, Normal robotics, MRS guided robotics)
	Result	Whether the cancer is found (Yes, No, Unknown)
	Result Details	A summary of pathological information like which core contains cancer.
	Biopsy Log	A ZIP file containing information of biopsy procedure like information of device calibration procedure, time to setup the device, time to do the biopsy, team members, version of device hardware, seed implementation, positioning error, etc.
	Remarks	Other information
Pathological Study	Date	Date of study
	Log	A ZIP file containing information of screening procedure like the number of slicing, findings, etc. Can even contains a video file, if it is small enough.
	Image	A ZIP file containing multiple JPEG files and a readme.txt. The readme.txt may record information like image interval, zoom rate, etc.
	Outlining	A ZIP file containing files produced by Bubble 3D 2.0 with the prostate outlined by an expert. Can also contains a readme.txt to indicate information like what is outlined and who is the expert.
	Laser scanning	A ZIP file containing the laser scanned models in STL format.
	Remarks	Other information
Complication	Date	Date of complication reported.
Complication	Summary	A summary of the complication.

Technology

TIPS is implemented using Java enterprise technology. Two major open source Java packages being used in TIPS are STRUTS and Hibernate, both under Apache Jakarta project. These libraries make rapid development of the application possible.

TIPS runs on Apache Tomcat, and use MySQL as the database server. However, it is portable to any other J2EE application server and other SQL server with minor, if any, changes. TIPS supports two languages at this moment: English and Chinese.