Grid-Enabled Medical Simulation Services

Objective

As the Internet revolutionised access to information, the Grid will revolutionise accessibility to applications. GEMSS will demonstrate how such technologies can be used to transform healthcare and enable Europe to lead that transformation. The GEMSS test-bed will be the first European medical computing and resource Grid rendering accessible a multitude of digital services in a clinical environment. Providing access to new tools for improved diagnosis, operative planning and surgical procedures will create health care benefit. Furthermore, GEMSS will develop an interoperable, innovative Grid middleware for medical services applications building on common Grid standards like the Globus toolkit. The focus is on innovative extensions that support medical applications including security models compliant with legal issues, fail-over and recovery from errors as well as workflow and service orchestration techniques for time-critical processes.

Objectives:
GEMSS will demonstrate that the Grid can be used to provide medical practitioners and researchers with access to advanced simulation and image processing services for improved pre-operative planning and near real-time surgical support. The GEMSS will build on top of existing Grid technologies, maintaining compliance with standards thereby ensuring future extensibility and interoperability, to provide support for sophisticated authorisation, workflow, security, error detection and recovery. The project will create a test-bed to evaluate & validate the GEMSS environment, including its integration into the end-users working environments. Furthermore, GEMSS aims to anticipate privacy, security and other legal concerns by examining and incorporating into its Grid services the latest laws and EU regulations related to providing medical services over the Internet.

Work description:
GEMSS is structured into 6 work packages:
WP1, System Design & Evaluation, will start to capture end-users and system requirements. Next, a high-level architecture will be defined for generic Grid services, which will enable aggregation into medical Grid portals or PSEs, and interaction with medical Grid services. Evaluation will thereafter form a continual process monitoring the success of the system design, software and test bed releases;
WP2, Grid Services and Security, is responsible for the development of tools for authoring Grid-based services that can be interrogated, negotiated and agreed with on the quality of the service that they will provide and strategies and services for error recovery from a range of failure conditions. Furthermore, it will select the technology and model for authentication, encryption and integrity of users, service providers and data and identify legal obstacles at the European level;
WP3, Medical Simulation System, will provide means of accessing the GEMSS building on existing Grid and Web technologies (like OGSA, Web Services, Jini, and CORBA) and design the service interaction models, protocols and interfaces both within the generic Grid services environment and when used in the medical Grid portal, PSEs or application servers. It will also be responsible for the system integration and test bed deployment as well as for the integration of Grid based collaborative tele-support and consulting tools;
WP4 will provide Grid-compliant medical simulation and image processing software targeting several key areas in the health-care sector, which can benefit from advanced digital modelling;
WP5, responsible for information dissemination activities, exploitation planning and clustering;
WP6, Project Management, will be active throughout the entire project lifecycle to ensure the promotion of project results and the progress of the project developments and to maximise the project's impact.

Milestones:
The GEMSS test-bed will include medical service applications, with varying performance and QoS requirements, and a Grid services infrastructure. Medical science professionals will evaluate this. At month 9, requirements specification, initial system design and the initial legal study will be completed. At month 18 a test-bed prototype will be in place and evaluated. After completion of all system components at month 24, final evaluation and legal reporting will be concluded.

Fields of science

• natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
• natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternet
• medical and health sciencesclinical medicinesurgerysurgical procedures
• social scienceslaw

Programme(s)

• FP5-IST - Programme for research, technological development and demonstration on a "User-friendly information society, 1998-2002"

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (9)