Tumor Imaging Metrics Core

The Tumor Imaging Metrics Core (TIMC) is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary service whose mission is to support timely, reliable imaging assessments and workflow for HCC clinical research investigators and patients enrolled in oncologic clinical trials evaluating novel cancer therapies.

TIMC strives to facilitate the conduct of these clinical trials by improving the quality and efficiency of tumor imaging assessments, providing compliant results for assisting with trial eligibility and treatment decisions, and streamlining audits and communication between study teams and imaging experts.

TIMC provides centralized, standardized, accurate, consistent, and timely longitudinal, multimodality anatomic, volumetric and functional tumor metrics including CT, MR, PET/CT and other nuclear medicine imaging studies to evaluate therapeutic response for patients enrolled in HCC oncologic clinical trials. TIMC supports more than 30 tumor response assessment criteria including but not limited to RECIST 1.1, iRECIST, Lugano, LYRIC, IWCLL and RANO. Results of tumor metric analyses are offered on a password-protected secure web-based report. The TIMC platform also facilitates efficient internal and/or external auditing.

Sharing Our Experience

Beyond HCC, TIMC currently collaborates with many other cancer centers around the U.S. in an effort to share experience, knowledge and workflow. Our web-based imaging informatics and workflow management platform, developed through TIMC and licensed to Yunu in 2022, is now used by 20 NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers (35% of all NCI-CCCs). By making this platform available to other institutions, the Core provides analysis tools and support to collaborating sites, which helps create a trans-cancer center clinical trials imaging research community.

Publication Acknowledgement

If research supported by this core facility results in publication, please acknowledge this support by including the following in your publication(s):

We thank Harvard Cancer Consortium in Boston, MA, for the use of the Tumor Imaging Metrics Core, which provided ______________________________ service. Harvard Cancer Consortium is supported in part by a NCI Cancer Center Support Grant # NIH 5 P30 CA06516.

Key Services

• Consultation services for image-based protocol and image analysis design
• Image capture and management of multimodality scans from all HCC institutions
• Tumor metrics performed on CT, MR, PET/CT and other nuclear medicine scans from patients enrolled in clinical trials according to trial-specific criteria
• Timely web-based reporting of results with annotated images, graphs, and results summary
• Database management of radiological data for clinical trials

Providing High-Quality Services

The primary focus of the TIMC is to provide high-quality tumor metrics imaging services for oncology clinical trials at HCC and beyond. For more than two decades, the TIMC has been a pioneering shared resource for clinical trials imaging assessments. We currently:

• Process over 13,500 scans per year
• Manage measurements for over 2,100 active clinical trials
• Provide services to 13 institutions

TIMC data and image management has also evolved over the years as the Core’s service and expertise grew. The TIMC utilizes an innovative informatics platform, developed by TIMC and exclusively licensed in 2022 to Yunu, Inc. (www.yunu.io), to manage the workflow, compliance, imaging assessments, reporting, billing, communication, and audit trails of its tumor metrics services.

The TIMC team also strives to stay at the forefront of clinical research trends and clinical trial needs. The Core directors, image analysts, and support staff engage in and study new assessment criteria as they are developed and implemented, contribute to the literature, and participate in various national and international scientific meetings.

NCI funding:

• As part of our innovation to enhance the functionality of our clinical trials imaging informatics platform, we received NCI Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) U24 funding (PI: Dr. Harris) to create (2015-2020), and sustain (2023-2028) an open-source web-based medical imaging framework, the Open Health Imaging Foundation (OHIF) viewer, which has become the worldwide standard used by thousands of academic and industry projects including NCI-funded platforms such as The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), Imaging Data Commons (IDC), and XNAT.
• We received additional OHIF funding by a new R03 award (2025-2027, PI: Dr. Harris) to further enhance the functionality and technology of the software.
• We received a renewal Academic-Industry Partnership R01 (2025-2030, Co-PIs: Drs. Kikinis and Harris) for our Lymph Node Quantification (LNQ) grant to use artificial intelligence to automate lymph node segmentation analysis and integrate this approach into our Yunu/TIMC clinical trials platform.
• Idris T, Anderson M, Harris G*, Van den Abbeele AD*.  (*Co-senior authors): Progressive Disease Response: Challenges and Insights Across Imaging Treatment Response Criteria Guidelines. 
  2026; RSNA Annual Meeting - Educational Exhibit
• Dorent R, Khajavi R, Idris T, Ziegler E, Somarouthu B, Jacene H, LaCasce A, Deissler J, Ehrhardt J, Engelson S, Fischer SM, Gu Y, Handels H, Kasai S, Kondo S, Maier-Hein K, Schnabel JA, Wang G, Wang L, Wald T, Yang GZ, Zhang H, Zhang M, Pieper S, Harris G, Kikinis R, Kapur T. LNQ 2023 challenge: Benchmark of weakly-supervised techniques for mediastinal lymph node quantification. J Mach Learn Biomed Imaging. 2025; Jan 29. doi: 10.59275/j.melba.2025-d482.
• Idris T, Somarouthu B, Jacene H, LaCasce A, Ziegler E, Pieper S, Khajavi R, Dorent R, Pujol S, Kikinis R, Harris G. Publication of annotated lymph node imaging dataset, Mediastinal Lymph Node Quantification (LNQ): Segmentation of Heterogeneous CT Data (Version 1) [Data set], from the Tumor Imaging Metrics Core and the Lymph Node Quantification (LNQ) grant 2024. The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). 2024; https://doi.org/10.7937/QVAZ-JA09

Some examples of landmark HCC trials using TIMC:

• Trial ID # 18-279: A Phase Ib study of Neoantigen Vaccine (NeoVax plus Montanide) in combination with Nivolumab and locally administered Ipilimumab in patients with advanced melanoma. Blass, et al. Cell. 2025; 188(19), 5125-5141.e27
• Trial ID # 19-828:. Innovative Trial for Understanding the Impact of Targeted Therapies in NF2 Related Schwannomatosis (INTUITT-NF2). Plotkin, et al.  N Engl J Med. 2024; 390:2284-94. 
  DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2400985
• Trial ID # 18-301: Phase 2 Two-Group Study of LY3023414 and Abemaciclib with or without Letrozole in Recurrent or Persistent Endometrial Cancer. In recent paper, patients with molecular response (MR) after the first or second cycle of letrozole/abemaciclib therapy had significantly better median PFS and OS regardless of the cutoff used for definition of MR. Konstantinopoulos, et al. J Clin Oncol. 2023; 41(3), 599-608. DOI: 10.1200/JCO.22.00628

Rates apply from October 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027

Included in the TIMC user fees are the following services.

• Consultation with HCC study team prior to trial initiation
• Image study archival for the length of the trial
• Longitudinal tumor measurements as specified in the IRB-approved protocol
• Database management of measurement results and image snapshots
• Web-based order entry and results reporting
• Assistance with trial audits with respect to the image analysis components of the trial

Trials will have the following initiation fee upon activation for protocol review and set-up:

• $500 for PI/Group Sponsored Trials
• $1,000 for Industry Sponsored Trials