On The Development of Secure Service-Oriented Architectures to Support Medical Research

In this article we report upon our experiences of developing Web-services based infrastruc-tures within two e-health projects. The first—a small demonstrator project funded by the UK’s National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI)—is concerned with facilitating the aggregation of different types of data (specifically, MRI scans and histopathology slides) to aid the treatment of colorectal cancer; the second—a rather larger project funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC)—is concerned with the development of a virtual research environment to support neuro-imaging research. In both cases, the underlying infrastructures are being developed by a team that is based in Oxford; it is the experiences of this team that we report upon in this article. We also report upon how we have considered the future potential for our systems interoperating with other systems which are deployed within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).