Grid technology for biomedical applications

International audienceThe deployment of biomedical applications in a grid environment has started about three years ago in several European projects and national ini-tiatives. These applications have demonstrated that the grid paradigm was rele-vant to the needs of the biomedical community. They have also highlighted that this community had very specific requirements on middleware and needed fur-ther structuring in large collaborations in order to participate to the deployment of grid infrastructures in the coming years. In this paper, we propose several ar-eas where grid technology can today improve research and healthcare. A cru-cial issue is to maximize the cross fertilization among projects in the perspec-tive of an environment where data of medical interest can be stored and made easily available to the different actors of healthcare, the physicians, the health-care centres and administrations, and of course the citizens

Information Systems and Healthcare XVII: Operational Stakeholder Relationships in the Deployment of a Data Storage Grid for Clinical Image Backup and Recovery

A data storage grid (DSG) is under development for a federation of clinical sites to provide a cost-effective backup and recovery solution for their clinical images. Geographic separation provides fault-tolerance against localized disasters. Pooling of storage resources across organizations utilizes economies of scale associated with storage area networks. However, the control and administration of a DSG is now spread across multiple organizations increasing the complexity of deployment. Socio-technical issues specific to a DSG arise as there are now multiple stakeholders linked together in a network of new relationships. Agreement upon every relationship is necessary to determine service level agreements, security, and liability such as in the event of a security breach. Implications of socio-technical networks and stakeholder analysis on the operators, rather than the users, of an interorganizational DSG are discussed

Grid technology for biomedical applications

Abstract. The deployment of biomedical applications in a grid environment has started about three years ago in several European projects and national initiatives. These applications have demonstrated that the grid paradigm was relevant to the needs of the biomedical community. They have also highlighted that this community had very specific requirements on middleware and needed further structuring in large collaborations in order to participate to the deployment of grid infrastructures in the coming years. In this paper, we propose several areas where grid technology can today improve research and healthcare. A crucial issue is to maximize the cross fertilization among projects in the perspective of an environment where data of medical interest can be stored and made easily available to the different actors of healthcare, the physicians, the healthcare centres and administrations, and of course the citizens.