MEDICUS: Globus-powered medical imaging and computing
A really nice Globus-based application: MEDICUS (Medical Imaging and Computing for Unified Information Sharing). This software federates medical imaging and computing resources for clinical and research applications. Quoting the authors:
The objectives of the MEDICUS project are to promote transparent and non-proprietary solutions for medical image processing, and medical image and data sharing between heath care providers, physicians, and researchers in the life sciences. The Globus Toolkit provides the necessary architecture platform and standards to engage in this diverse and difficult field. As such it provides a vendor independent solution to efficiently communicate medical images and image outcome at various levels in the healthcare enterprise.
Why I like it:
- It's the real deal--it already provides access to hundreds of thousands of images at some 40 sites across the U.S., including 27 from the Children's Oncology Group, allowing users to publish, search for, access, and process images in powerful ways.
- It is a lovely example of how Globus services (security, data, computing, etc.) can be used to develop secure, robust, and efficient distributed systems quickly and easily. (For details, see this slide set or the various papers on the MEDICUS web site.)
- It's been set up as an incubator on dev.globus, facilitating community access and contributions.
The responsible parties include Stephan Erberich, Ann Chervenak, Carl Kesselman, Manasee Bhandekar, and Marvin Nelson.
From the incubator web page, a list of features:
- Vendor independent Grid Enterprise PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) deployment by vertically integrating Globus Toolkit Data services
- DICOM legacy support to connect medical image modalities (MR, CT, X-Ray, etc.) to data Grids
- Open-source image archiving and distributed warehousing for large-scale multi-center clinical trials
- Medical image guided drug discovery in combination with remote processing (GRAM service)
- Flexible fault-tolerant off-site DICOM Grid image storage for man-made or natural disaster recovery
- Cost-efficient tele-radiology and image workflow between community care facilities and remote specialist using the Grid
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