Speaker
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.
The Medical Data Manager gives secure and transparent access to
patient images stored
in DICOM format. It is interfaced to the gLite Data Management
System and it includes
some necessary additional components such as the SRM-DICOM
interface and the AMGA
metadata database. Because the search of medical records often
involve more than a
file search in a catalog, AMGA is used to search for files on
their associated
metadata. We developed SRM-DICOM interface, which provides
read-only access to DICOM
servers of hospitals. This interface uses the standard DICOM
protocol in hospital and
the standard SRM protocol of the grid data storage. It is
integrated within gLiteIO
and FiReMan, which provides access control. The last component,
Hydra, ensures the
encryption of data. The low availability of the gLite WMS on EGEE
is a limitation to
the extension of the MDM.
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).
Medical images acquired in radiology centers represent very large
amounts of data.
The medical image analysis community (physicians, researchers,
etc) needs to access
such large, distributed and sensitive data sets for various
purposes (patient
healthcare, epidemiology, etc). The aim of the Medical Data
Manager is to provide an
interface between medical data repositories inside hospitals
(DICOM format) and the
grid distributed data management system to respond these needs.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
The metadata and the data security are the two key components to
answer user needs.
In the future, medical metadata needs to be distributed over the
acquisition sites.
An AMGA server will be installed at each site to ensure a local
control. The
hierarchical organization of AMGA must be adapted to this
purpose. The GFAL-based
data management system currently deployed on EGEE does not
provide today the expected
level of functionality to replace the gLite WMS.
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
The long term objective is to convince hospitals to use grid for
their data
management and exchange needs. The Medical Data Manager enables
access to patient
images (DICOM files) and associated metadata (patient records),
which are stored in
remote hospitals. The access to large image repositories of data
collected over
several countries will be useful for statistical and
epidemiological studies. The
grid access policy can be defined at site level and data
encryption is used to
protect sensitive data. The scale is potentially very large and
the grid
infrastructure could be a solution to provide reliable and
secured connections. A
wide scale deployment can only be envisaged once data security is
reliable enough and
trusted by end users.
