Bridging clinical information systems and grid middleware: a Medical Data Manager

This paper describes the effort to deploy a Medical Data Management service on top of the EGEE grid infrastructure. The most widely accepted medical image standard, DICOM, was developed for fulfilling clinical practice. It is implemented in most medical image acquisition and analysis devices. The EGEE middleware is using the SRM standard for handling grid files. Our prototype is exposing an SRM compliant interface to the grid middleware, transforming on the fly SRM requests into DICOM transactions. The prototype ensures user identification, strict file access control and data protection through the use of relevant grid services. This Medical Data Manager is easing the access to medical databases needed for many medical data analysis applications deployed today. It offers a high level data management service, compatible with clinical practices, which encourages the migration of medical applications towards grid infrastructures. A limited scale testbed has been deployed as a proof of concept of this new service. The service is expected to be put into production with the next EGEE middleware generation.