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With the ever-increasing complexity of science and engineering, many important research problems are being
addressed by collaborative, multidisciplinary teams. We present a web-based collaborative environment for small
animal imaging research, called the Mouse Imaging Collaboration Environment (MICE). MICE provides an effective
and user-friendly tool for managing and sharing of the terabytes of high-resolution and high-dimension
image data generated at small animal imaging core facilities. We describe the design of MICE and our experience
in the implementation and deployment of a beta-version baseline-MICE. The baseline-MICE provides an
integrated solution from image data acquisition to end-user access and long-term data storage at our UH/Case
Small Animal Imaging Resource Center. As image data is acquired from scanners, it is pushed to the MICE
server which automatically stores it in a directory structure according to its DICOM metadata. The directory
structure reflects imaging modality, principle investigators, animal models, scanning dates and study details.
Registered end-users access this imaging data through an authenticated web-interface. Thumbnail images are
created by custom scripts running on the MICE server while data down-loading is achieved through standard
web-browser ftp. MICE provides a security infrastructure that manages user roles, their access privileges such
as read/write, and the right to modify the access privileges. Additional data security measures include a two
server paradigm with the Web access server residing outside a network firewall to provide access through the Internet,
and the imaging data server - a large RAID storage system supporting flexible backup policies - residing
behind the protected firewall with a dedicated link to the Web access server. Direct network link to the RAID
storage system outside the firewall other than this dedicated link is not permitted. Establishing the initial image
directory structure and letting the project leader manage data access through a web-interface represent Phase I
implementation. In Phase II, features for uploading image analysis scripts and results back to the MICE server
will be implemented, as well as mechanisms facilitating asynchronous and synchronous discussion, annotation,
and analysis. Most of MICE features are being implemented in the Plone5 object-oriented database environment
which greatly shortens developmental time and effort by the reuse of a variety of Plone's open-source modules
for Content Management Systems.7, 8 The open-source modules are well suited as an implementation basis of
MICE and provide data integration as a built-in primitive.
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