Secure, reliable and dynamic access to distributed clinical data

An abundance of statistical and scientific data exists in the area of clinical and epidemiological studies. Much of this data is distributed across regional, national and international boundaries with different policies on access and usage, and a multitude of different schemata for the data often complicated by the variety of supporting clinical coding schemes. This prevents the wide scale collation and analysis of such data as is often needed to infer clinical outcomes and to determine the often moderate effect of drugs. Through grid technologies it is possible to overcome the barriers introduced by distribution of heterogeneous data and services. However reliability, dynamicity and fine-grained security are essential in this domain, and are not typically offered by current grids. The MRC funded VOTES project (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) has implemented a prototype infrastructure specifically designed to meet these challenges. This paper describes this on-going implementation effort and the lessons learned in building grid frameworks for and within a clinical environment

Grid infrastructures supporting paediatric endocrinology across Europe

Paediatric endocrinology is a highly specialised area of clinical medicine with many experts with specific knowledge distributed over a wide geographical area. The European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology (ESPE) is an example of such a body of experts that require regular collaboration and sharing of data and knowledge. This paper describes work, developed as a corollary to the VOTES project [1] and implementing similar architectures, to provide a data grid that allows information to be efficiently distributed between collaborating partners, and also allows wide-scale analyses to be run over the entire data-set, which necessarily involves crossing domain boundaries and negotiating data access between administrations that only trust each other to a limited degree

Grid Databases for Shared Image Analysis in the MammoGrid Project

The MammoGrid project aims to prove that Grid infrastructures can be used for collaborative clinical analysis of database-resident but geographically distributed medical images. This requires: a) the provision of a clinician-facing front-end workstation and b) the ability to service real-world clinician queries across a distributed and federated database. The MammoGrid project will prove the viability of the Grid by harnessing its power to enable radiologists from geographically dispersed hospitals to share standardized mammograms, to compare diagnoses (with and without computer aided detection of tumours) and to perform sophisticated epidemiological studies across national boundaries. This paper outlines the approach taken in MammoGrid to seamlessly connect radiologist workstations across a Grid using an "information infrastructure" and a DICOM-compliant object model residing in multiple distributed data stores in Italy and the UKComment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Accessing Patient Records in Virtual Healthcare Organisations

The ARTEMIS project is developing a semantic web service based P2P interoperability infrastructure for healthcare information systems that will allow healthcare providers to securely share patient records within virtual healthcare organisations. Authorisation decisions to access patient records across organisation boundaries can be very dynamic and must occur within a strict legislative framework. In ARTEMIS we are developing a dynamic authorisation mechanism called PBAC that provides a means of contextual and process oriented access control to enforce healthcare business processes. PBAC demonstrates how healthcare providers can dynamically share patient records for care pathways across organisation boundaries

Secure Data Sharing With AdHoc

In the scientific circles, there is pressing need to form temporary and dynamic collaborations to share diverse resources (e.g. data, an access to services, applications or various instruments). Theoretically, the traditional grid technologies respond to this need with the abstraction of a Virtual Organization (VO). In practice its procedures are characterized by latency, administrative overhead and are inconvenient to its users. We would like to propose the Manifesto for Secure Sharing. The main postulate is that users should be able to share data and resources by themselves without any intervention on the system administrator's side. In addition, operating an intuitive interface does not require IT skills. AdHoc is a resource sharing interface designed for users willing to share data or computational resources within seconds and almost effortlessly. The AdHoc application is built on the top of traditional security frameworks, such as the PKI X.509 certificate scheme, Globus GSI, gLite VOMS and Shibboleth. It enables users rapid and secure collaboration

Towards a virtual research environment for paediatric endocrinology across Europe

Paediatric endocrinology is a medical specialty dealing with variations of physical growth and sexual development in childhood. Genetic anomalies that can cause disorders of sexual development in children are rare. Given this, sharing and collaboration on the small number of cases that occur is needed by clinical experts in the field. The EU-funded EuroDSD project (www.eurodsd.eu) is one such collaboration involving clinical centres and clinical and genetic experts across Europe. Through the establishment of a virtual research environment (VRE) supporting sharing of data and a variety of clinical and bioinformatics analysis tools, EuroDSD aims to provide a research infrastructure for research into disorders of sex development. Security, ethics and information governance are at the heart of this infrastructure. This paper describes the infrastructure that is being built and the inherent challenges in security, availability and dependability that must be overcome for the enterprise to succeed

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Enhancing Privacy and Authorization Control Scalability in the Grid through Ontologies

© 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The use of data Grids for sharing relevant data has proven to be successful in many research disciplines. However, the use of these environments when personal data are involved (such as in health) is reduced due to its lack of trust. There are many approaches that provide encrypted storages and key shares to prevent the access from unauthorized users. However, these approaches are additional layers that should be managed along with the authorization policies. We present in this paper a privacy-enhancing technique that uses encryption and relates to the structure of the data and their organizations, providing a natural way to propagate authorization and also a framework that fits with many use cases. The paper describes the architecture and processes, and also shows results obtained in a medical imaging platform.Manuscript received November 19, 2007; revised July 27, 2008. First published August 4,2008; cur-rent version published January 4,2009. This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science to develop the project "ngGrid-New Generation Components for the Efficient Exploitation of eScience Infrastructures," under Grant TIN2006-12860 and in part by the Structural Funds of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).Blanquer Espert, I.; Hernández García, V.; Segrelles Quilis, JD.; Torres Serrano, E. (2009). Enhancing Privacy and Authorization Control Scalability in the Grid through Ontologies. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine. 13(1):16-24. https://doi.org/10.1109/TITB.2008.2003369S162413

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure