ChRIS Research Integration Service

ChRIS (ChRIS Research Integration Service) is an infrastructure that initially started as an open source research project at the Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center to allow clinicians better access to the latest developments in research software innovation, particularly software that analyzes image data such as MRIs and X-Rays. 

Clinicians are focused on results, but advanced research software can be difficult to use and run. ChRIS grew to bridge that gap between clinical need and software reality — first to simplify clinicians’ access to advanced software, but also to allow other software developers and researchers the ability to innovate on new data. ChRIS provides a powerfully simple way to extract data from the hospital Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and securely perform advanced analytics using high-performance computing systems within BCH. 

A partnership with the MOC Alliance and Red Hat enabled ChRIS to scale and take advantage of cloud computing resources. Healthcare analytics application development using ChRIS has been standardized to use containers, support for third-party application development has been added along with the integration of an application/plugin hub, and ChRIS turned into a cloud service that can store data in object stores and execute computation on cloud systems.

In late 2023, ChRIS deployed on the MOC-A’s open production cloud, the New England Research Cloud (NERC) (see ChRIS on the NERC in 2024).

Repos
https://github.com/FNNDSC/

Links
https://chrisproject.org/
Creating ChRIS
ChRIS at the Red Hat Summit 2018

Project Documentation
https://chrisproject.org/docs