GEMSS: grid-infrastructure for medical service provision

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Distributed Computing
• Grid Computing

Background:

• The European GEMSS Project focuses on creating medical Grid service prototypes.
• A secure, service-oriented infrastructure is essential for distributed on-demand supercomputing in healthcare.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate medical Grid service prototypes within a secure infrastructure.
• To ensure negotiable Quality of Service (QoS), flexible business models, and robust security for patient data privacy and legal compliance.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a service-oriented architecture built on standard Grid and Web technologies.
• Developed a generic Grid service provision framework to simplify application integration.
• Created a pluggable component framework for client-side applications, managing business processes, service discovery, QoS negotiation, and workflow.

Main Results:

• An operational first version of the GEMSS Grid infrastructure is available.
• A Grid test-bed was established, deploying six medical Grid service prototypes.
• Prototypes include maxillo-facial surgery simulation, neuro-surgery support, radio-surgery planning, inhaled drug-delivery simulation, cardiovascular simulation, and advanced image reconstruction.

Conclusions:

• The GEMSS Grid infrastructure leverages standard Web Services technology with a future path towards OGSA.
• Demonstrates the Grid's capability to provide advanced simulation and image processing services for medical practitioners and researchers.
• Enhances preoperative planning and offers near real-time surgical support.