Summary
Objectives:
The European GEMSS Project is concerned with the creation of medical Grid service
prototypes and their evaluation in a secure service-oriented infrastructure for distributed
on demand/supercomputing. Key aspects of the GEMSS Grid middleware include negotiable
QoS support for time-critical service provision, flexible support for business models,
and security at all levels in order to ensure privacy of patient data as well as compliance
to EU law.
Methods:
The GEMSS Grid infrastructure is based on a service-oriented architecture and is
being built on top of existing standard Grid and Web technologies. The GEMSS infrastructure
offers a generic Grid service provision framework that hides the complexity of transforming
existing applications into Grid services. For the development of client-side applications
or portals, a pluggable component framework has been developed, providing developers
with full control over business processes, service discovery, QoS negotiation, and
workflow, while keeping their underlying implementation hidden from view.
Results:
A first version of the GEMSS Grid infrastructure is operational and has been used
for the set-up of a Grid test-bed deploying six medical Grid service prototypes including
maxillofacial surgery simulation, neuro-surgery support, radio-surgery planning, inhaled
drug-delivery simulation, cardiovascular simulation and advanced image reconstruction.
Conclusions:
The GEMSS Grid infrastructure is based on standard Web Services technology with an
anticipated future transition path towards the OGSA standard proposed by the Global
Grid Forum. GEMSS demonstrates that the Grid can be used to provide medical practitioners
and researchers with access to advanced simulation and image processing services for
improved preoperative planning and near real-time surgical support.
Keywords
Computer simulation - computer communication networks - computer security
