Grid-Based Sleep Research: Analysis of Polysomnographies Using a Grid Infrastructure

The analysis of biosignals, such as the electroencephalogram EEG or the electrocardiogram (ECG), is essential for diagnosis in many medical areas, in particular sleep medicine and sleep research. A standard method in this field is the polysomnography, a multidimensional biosignal recording during the whole bedtime phase. Within the SIESTA project, a European multicenter study, comprehensive clinical and polysommnographic records from over 300 persons has been collected. To make the data available for researchers as reference for clinical research and development of new analysis tools, the SIESTA database is implemented into a grid infrastructure. To date, the complete data is stored into the grid and different algorithms for automated ECG analysis are implemented. The database can be queried and the matching data can be analysed on record level and collection level. The application is modelled as a workflow and integrated into the grid using a workflow manager. A graphical user interface is implemented as a grid portlet. It allows the initialization of new computation tasks as well as the monitoring and result-retrieval from already launched analyses.