Using grid technologies to face medical image analysis challenges

The availability of digital imagers inside hospitals and their ever growing inspection capabilities have established digital medical images as a key component of many pathologies diagnosis, follow-up and treatment. To face the growing image analysis requirements, automated medical image processing algorithms have been developed over the two past decades. In parallel, medical image databases have been set up in health centers. Some attempts have been made to cross data coming from different origins for studies involving large databases. Grid technologies appear to be a promising tool to face the raising challenges of computational medicine. They offer wide area access to distributed databases in a secured environment and they bring the computational power needed to complete some large scale statistical studies involving image processing. In this paper, we review grid-related requirements of medical application that we illustrate through two real examples.