MedIGrid: a medical imaging application for computational Grids

In the last decades, diagnosing medical images has heavily relied on digital imaging. As a consequence, huge amounts of data produced by modern medical instruments need to be processed, organized, and visualized in a suitable response time. Many efforts have been devoted to the development of digital Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) which archive and distribute image information across a hospital and provide Web access to avoid the expensive deployment of a large number of such systems. On the other hand, this approach does not solve problems related to the increasing demand of high performance computing and storage facilities, which cannot be placed within a hospital. In this work we describe MedIGrid, an application that enables nuclear doctors to transparently use high performance computers and storage systems for the PET/SPECT (Positron Emission Tomography/Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) image processing, management, visualization and analysis. MedIGrid is the result of the joint efforts of a group of researchers committed to the development of a distributed application to test and deploy new reconstruction methods in clinical environments. The outcomes of this work include a set of platform independent software tools to read medical images, control the execution of computing intensive tomographic algorithms, and explore the reconstructed tomographic volumes. In the paper we describe how the collaboration among different research groups has contributed to the integration of the application into a single framework. The results of our work are discussed.