A Grid Information Infrastructure for Medical Image Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents the MammoGrid Information Infrastructure, a Grid-enabled system designed to facilitate distributed medical image analysis and knowledge discovery across European healthcare institutions, enhancing collaboration and data management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Grid-based infrastructure for federated medical image databases, enabling efficient meta-data analysis and collaborative research in medical imaging.

Findings

Development of a Europe-wide mammogram database

Implementation of a Grid-enabled infrastructure for medical data

Support for collaborative image analysis across institutions

Abstract

The storage and manipulation of digital images and the analysis of the information held in those images are essential requirements for next-generation medical information systems. The medical community has been exploring collaborative approaches for managing image data and exchanging knowledge and Grid technology [1] is a promising approach to enabling distributed analysis across medical institutions and for developing new collaborative and cooperative approaches for image analysis without the necessity for clinicians to co-locate. The EU-funded MammoGrid project [2] is one example of this and it aims to develop a Europe-wide database of mammograms to support effective co-working between healthcare professionals across the EU. The MammoGrid prototype comprises a high-quality clinician visualization workstation (for data acquisition and inspection), a DICOM-compliant interface to a set of medical services (annotation, security, image analysis, data storage and querying services) residing on a so-called Grid-box and secure access to a network of other Grid-boxes connected through Grid middleware. One of the main deliverables of the project is a Grid-enabled infrastructure that manages federated mammogram databases across Europe. This paper outlines the MammoGrid Information Infrastructure (MII) for meta-data analysis and knowledge discovery in the medical imaging domain.