Safe storage and multi-modal search for medical images

Modern hospitals produce enormous amounts of data in all departments, from images, to lab results, medication use, and release letters. Since several years these data are most often produced in digital form, making them accessible for researchers to optimize the outcome of care process and analyze all available data across patients. The Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) are no exception with its daily radiology department's output of over 140'000 images in 2010, with a majority of them being tomographic slices. In this paper we introduce tools for uploading and accessing DICOM images and associated metadata in a secure Grid storage. These data are made available for authorized persons using a Grid security framework, as security is a main problem in secondary use of image data, where images are to be stored outside of the clinical image archive. Our tool combines the security and metadata access of a Grid middleware with the visual search that uses GIFT.