USC's Globus Medicus: Observation Grid

Computerworld - University of Southern CaliforniaGlobus Medicus

Allows transfer and review of medical images in near real time among grid-enabled sites

Its not only New Age gurus who use visualization techniques to improve peoples health. Medical doctors use a growing array of diagnostic equipment to create 3-D and 4-D images of patients. Remotely sharing these massive files, however, is largely impossible using traditional methods because network speeds are insufficient and disparate hospital systems are often incompatible.

As a result, patients have had to bring their own records, in hard copy or on CD-ROMs, to exams. Even worse, doctors have had to rely on faxed copies of images or wait for a digital copy to arrive in the mail.

The ability to see active 3-D graphics at the point of need enables the right decisions to be made as rapidly as possible, says Clive Longbottom, service director of business process analysis at research firm Quocirca Ltd. in Windsor, England. Going back and forth between the site and a centralized viewing resource is just not feasible these days.

The answer to the problem is grid computing. A grid provides far greater resource capability for far less cost than traditional supercomputers, says Longbottom.

Thats the approach taken by the Globus Medicus (Medical Imaging and Computing for Unified Information Sharing) project, which uses grid computing over Internet and Internet2 connections to exchange images between medical centers in the U.S. and Canada. With Medicus, doctors can view images immediately and share them with experts worldwide when a second opinion is needed.

Grid technology provides the technical foundation to enable large-scale 3-D and 4-D image transfer, says Stephan G. Erberich, leader of the Medicus project and an assistant professor of research radiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern Californias Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles. Medicus added grid publication and discovery of Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine [DICOM] images, [the standard] used by all medical imaging devices, Erberich says.

Medicus was developed using the Globus Toolkit, an open-source set of grid-computing middleware from the Globus Alliance, an organization sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the U.K.s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, among others. It features adaptations of Globus Toolkit components, including ones for data transfer, security and data management.

Authorized users can access any of the patient files in the system, regardless of which institution holds them. This model is applicable only to clinical trials, however, since trial participants agree to have their records made available to others involved in the research.

The project started in 2003 and has grown to include 41 medical centers. It will soon expand to cover all 230 centers of the Childrens Oncology Group. Initial developers were Erberich, as well as Ann Chervenak and Carl Kesselman from USCs Information Sciences Institute. The National Cancer Institute and other organizations have donated $300,000 in funding.

What is unique is the ability to do remote visualization using open source, says Addison Snell, vice president and general manager at Tabor Research in San Diego. And its at a price point where it becomes effective to integrate into a hospital workflow environment.

Since DICOM images werent designed for distributed access, Erberich and his team had to develop a security model that allowed patients to control access to the images. Another challenge was to break down the barriers that existed between the systems maintained by different research centers.

Medicus demonstrates that the silo architecture of health care technology can be overcome by [service-oriented architecture], says Erberich.

Now, radiologists can obtain medical images directly from their DICOM display over the grid, doing diagnostic reporting in minutes after image acquisition, rather than in days, he says.

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