Grid Databases for Shared Image Analysis in the MammoGrid Project

TL;DR

The paper discusses the MammoGrid project, which leverages Grid infrastructure to enable distributed, collaborative analysis of mammogram images across hospitals in Italy and the UK, supporting clinical and epidemiological research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to connect radiologist workstations via a Grid using a DICOM-compliant object model for distributed medical image databases.

Findings

Successful integration of distributed mammogram databases across countries

Enabling real-time clinician queries and diagnosis comparison

Supporting epidemiological studies across borders

Abstract

The MammoGrid project aims to prove that Grid infrastructures can be used for collaborative clinical analysis of database-resident but geographically distributed medical images. This requires: a) the provision of a clinician-facing front-end workstation and b) the ability to service real-world clinician queries across a distributed and federated database. The MammoGrid project will prove the viability of the Grid by harnessing its power to enable radiologists from geographically dispersed hospitals to share standardized mammograms, to compare diagnoses (with and without computer aided detection of tumours) and to perform sophisticated epidemiological studies across national boundaries. This paper outlines the approach taken in MammoGrid to seamlessly connect radiologist workstations across a Grid using an "information infrastructure" and a DICOM-compliant object model residing in multiple distributed data stores in Italy and the UK