Using the grid to analyze the pharmacokinetic modelling after contrast administration in dynamic MRI

The analysis of the angiogenesis in hepatic lesions is an important marker of tumour aggressiveness and response to therapy. However, the quantitative analysis of this fact requires a deep knowledge of the hepatic perfusion. The development of pharmacokinetic models constitutes a very valuable tool, but it is computationally intensive. Moreover, abdominal imaging processing increases the computational requirements since the movement of the patient makes images in a time series incomparable, requiring a previous pre-processing. This work presents a Grid environment developed to deal with the computational demand of pharmacokinetic modelling. This article proposes and implements a four-level software architecture that provides a simple interface to the user and deals transparently with the complexity of Grid environment. The four layers implemented are: Grid Layer (the closest to the Grid infrastructure), the Gate-to- Grid (which transforms the user requests to Grid operations), the Web Services layer (which provides a simple, standard and ubiquitous interface to the user) and the Application Layer. An application has been developed on top of this architecture to manage the execution of multi-parametric groups of co-registration actions on a large set of medical images. The execution has been performed on the EGEE Grid infrastructure. The application is platform-independent and can be used from any computer without special requirements.