Facilities

The Animal and Veterinary Services (AVS) Image Analysis Laboratory is located in Room 141 of the Poole Agricultural Center on the Clemson University campus. The lab has restricted key access and is equipped with radiographic viewboxes, a password-protected iMac image analysis workstation, Lacie 6gb external hard drive, 2 dedicated Ethernet ports, and a battery backup system with surge protection. Image analysis workstation hardware consists of a 27 inch iMac with Retina 5K display, 32GB memory upgrade, 3TB fusion drive, 4.0 GHz quad-core Intel core i7, and 2 linked 27-inch Thunderbolt high resolution displays. Image analysis capabilities include morphometry, densitometry, segmentation and volume rendering for digital radiography, ultrasonography, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance images. OsiriX and Horos software are available for analysis of DICOM format images. Adobe Photoshop software is available for analysis of tiff, jpeg, PNG and pdf formatted images. Secure cloud storage and restricted sharing of research image data are available through Clemson Box. Research image files are archived for future use by PIs using a Clemson Secure Box folder.

Established methodologies for large animal model research projects include the following: qualitative assessments of imaging characteristics of pathology, repeatability and reliability of imaging measures, accuracy of imaging measures relative to a gold standard, and comparisons of diagnostic sensitivity/specificity/positive predictive value/negative predictive value between imaging methods.