New Advanced Technologies to Provide Decentralised and Secure Access to Medical Records: Case Studies in Oncology

The main problem for health professionals and patients in accessing information is that this information is very often distributed over many medical records and locations. This problem is particularly acute in cancerology because patients may be treated for many years and undergo a variety of examinations. Recent advances in technology make it feasible to gain access to medical records anywhere and anytime, allowing the physician or the patient to gather information from an “ephemeral electronic patient record”. However, this easy access to data is accompanied by the requirement for improved security (confidentiality, traceability, integrity, ...) and this issue needs to be addressed. In this paper we propose and discuss a decentralised approach based on recent advances in information sharing and protection: Grid technologies and watermarking methodologies. The potential impact of these technologies for oncology is illustrated by the examples of two experimental cases: a cancer surveillance network and a radiotherapy treatment plan. It is expected that the proposed approach will constitute the basis of a future secure “google-like” access to medical records

La grille au service du développement médical en Afrique

PCSV, présenté par F. Jacq, pas de proceedingsObjectives: Telemedicine networks allow to train local physicians and to improve diagnosis by exchanging medical data. But the set-up of multipoint dynamic telemedicine requires moving towards GRID technologies. The objective is to develop telemedicine services for physicians from Burkina Faso and France with the perspective of setting up a grid infrastructure between the participating medical sites. Methods: A web site to exchange diagnosis on diabetic retinopathy was developed in PHP. Another application using web services was developed to exchange patient information on ophthalmology between two databases. Results: The main difficulty comes from limited resources in developing countries including staff skills, bandwidth and funding. But the collaboration with dispensaries opened a door to enhanced collaboration between physicians of France and Burkina Faso Conclusions: These applications are designed with the aim of their use on grids which opens the perspective of multipoint dynamic telemedicine. We are developing a new generation of telemedicine service using experience acquired in the last two years

HOPE, an open platform for medical data management on the grid

International audienc

Proposing a roadmap for HealthGrids

Présentation commune des éditeur

Innovative in silico approaches to address avian flu using grid technology

The recent years have seen the emergence of diseases which have spread very quickly all around the world either through human travels like SARS or animal migration like avian flu. Among the biggest challenges raised by infectious emerging diseases, one is related to the constant mutation of the viruses which turns them into continuously moving targets for drug and vaccine discovery. Another challenge is related to the early detection and surveillance of the diseases as new cases can appear just anywhere due to the globalization of exchanges and the circulation of people and animals around the earth, as recently demonstrated by the avian flu epidemics. For 3 years now, a collaboration of teams in Europe and Asia has been exploring some innovative in silico approaches to better tackle avian flu taking advantage of the very large computing resources available on international grid infrastructures. Grids were used to study the impact of mutations on the effectiveness of existing drugs against H5N1 and to find potentially new leads active on mutated strains. Grids allow also the integration of distributed data in a completely secured way. The paper presents how we are currently exploring how to integrate the existing data sources towards a global surveillance network for molecular epidemiology.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to Infectious Disorders - Drug Target

The Use of Grid Storage Protocols for Healthcare Applications

Grid computing has attracted worldwide attention for a variety of domains. Healthcare projects focus on data mining and standardization techniques, the issue of data accessibility and transparency over the storage systems on the Grid has seldom been tackled. In this position paper, we identify the key issues and requirements imposed by Healthcare applications and point out how Grid Storage Technology can be used to satisfy those requirements. The main contribution of this work is the identification of the characteristics and protocols that make Grid Storage technology attractive for building a Healthcare data storage infrastructure