Speaker
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
Following the grid vision and aiming at enriching it, the HeC project is developing an integrated health care platform for European Paediatrics that makes use of the underlying grid infrastructure through a series of biomedical domain specific services. Given the objectives and the scope of the project, the grid has been naturally selected as a low cost and cost-efficient facility which can appropriately support the end-users needs in terms of computational power (e.g. for executing medical image processing and data mining algorithms), storage capacity (e.g. for storing thousands of patients’ scans and associated clinical reports) and security (e.g. for guarantying a satisfactory security level when accessing patient data). The grid is also used as a technological glue to interconnect the several partners of the project, in particular for dealing with their highly heterogeneous Information Systems. Beyond connectivity, the grid also serves as a collaboration vehicle.
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
Early January, HeC has demonstrated at the Hospital Necker (APHP - Necker Enfants Malades in Paris), its first prototype of the so-called “Health-e-Child Gateway” software, a secure portal of online medical services for storing and manipulating patient data from clinical records to medical images. Based on leading edge technologies such as the gLite grid middleware, this advanced prototype highlights the maturity of such complex technologies and their relevance when applied to health care. The HeC prototype is, at the time of writing, the result of nearly two years of active research and development in collaboration with an important community of clinicians and domain experts, which has been developed and deployed inside the HeC private gLite-based grid infrastructure. Amongst the first technological contributions of the project, a security prototype was delivered as well as innovative domain specific client applications.
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
Health-e-Child (HeC) endeavours to respond to the increasingly pressing demand to fully integrate and exploit heterogeneous biomedical information for improved clinical practice, medical research and personalized health care. As an integrated project of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission, HeC brings together three major paediatric medical centres with several European companies, university groups and research institutions specialized in grid-based (bio)medical technologies.
Abstracts for online demonstrations must provide a summary of the demo content. Places for demos are limited and this summary will be used as part of the selection procedure. Please include the visual impact of the demo and highlight any specific requirements (e.g. network connection). In general, a successful demo is expected to have some supporting material (poster) and be capable of running on a single screen or projector.
HeC proposes a highly graphical demo of its platform and gLite-based infrastructure, which requires two workstations (to be provided by HeC), a video-projector and a simple Internet connection (without proxy). Demonstration flow: user logs in the system thanks to a physical USB Key, which he connects to his workstation. The Key contains his credentials and basic portable applications to enter the HeC VO. Immediately after authentication, the so-called Peer-to-Peer Patient Privacy network (P2P3) is established in the local network to which the clinician’s workstation is connected, which enables him to store and share patient private information. The clinician then accesses patients’ medical records from various clinical centres. In a second time the clinician starts the HeC Case Reasoner application, which enables to explore and compare the records related to several patients, and to visualize their place in the corresponding distribution.
