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A Grid-Based Image Archival and Analysis System

Affiliation of the authors: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

Correspondence and reprints: Tahsin Kurc, PhD, Biomedical Informatics Department, Ohio State University, 3184 Graves Hall, 333 West 10th Avenue, Columbus, OH, 43210; e-mail: <kurc{at}bmi.osu.edu>.

Received for publication: 09/13/04; accepted for publication: 01/05/05.

Here the authors present a Grid-aware middleware system, called GridPACS, that enables management and analysis of images in a massive scale, leveraging distributed software components coupled with interconnected computation and storage platforms. The need for this infrastructure is driven by the increasing biomedical role played by complex datasets obtained through a variety of imaging modalities. The GridPACS architecture is designed to support a wide range of biomedical applications encountered in basic and clinical research, which make use of large collections of images. Imaging data yield a wealth of metabolic and anatomic information from macroscopic (e.g., radiology) to microscopic (e.g., digitized slides) scale. Whereas this information can significantly improve understanding of disease pathophysiology as well as the noninvasive diagnosis of disease in patients, the need to process, analyze, and store large amounts of image data presents a great challenge.