The MAGIC-5 project: Medical Applications on a Grid Infrastructure Connection

The main purpose of the MAGIC-5 collaboration is the development of Computer Aided Detection (CAD) software for Medical Applications on distributed databases by means of a GRID Infrastructure Connection. A prototype of the system, based on the AliEn GRID Services is already available with a central Server running common services and several clients connecting to it. It has been already successfully used for applications in mammography together with a specific CAD developed within the collaboration. Applications to the case of malignant nodule detection in lung CT scans are now being implemented, while a use of the GRID services is also being applied to PET image analysis aiming at early Alzheimer disease. One of the future prospect of our project is the migration from AliEn to the EGEE/gLite middleware which is likely to become a European standard and will certainly provide more sophisticated tools with respect to the present AliEn functionality. In this work the status of the project and its future prospects will be given, with particular attention to the data management and processing aspects. Medical applications carried on by the collaboration will be also described together with the analysis of the results so far obtained.