MammoGrid: A Service Oriented Architecture based Medical Grid Application

The MammoGrid project has recently delivered its first proof-of-concept prototype using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based Grid application to enable distributed computing spanning national borders. The underlying AliEn Grid infrastructure has been selected because of its practicality and because of its emergence as a potential open source standards-based solution for managing and coordinating distributed resources. The resultant prototype is expected to harness the use of huge amounts of medical image data to perform epidemiological studies, advanced image processing, radiographic education and ultimately, tele-diagnosis over communities of medical virtual organisations. The MammoGrid prototype comprises a high-quality clinician visualization workstation used 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. This paper outlines the MammoGrid approach in managing a federation of Grid-connected mammography databases in the context of the recently delivered prototype and will also describe the next phase of prototyping.