BAXSQL: A Functional MRI Data Management Tool for the Medical Grid Using Ninf-G

A data management tool is developed to support the management of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data sets in the Medical Grid Project (MGP) testbed. The tool implements a client-server framework with the Ninf-G middleware providing the necessary infrastructure. The client application runs in the user¿s local machine and can be used to interact with the server application running in MGP¿s remote data servers. The server application manages the storage of the actual fMRI data sets and employs a backend database server for storing fMRI metadata. It also supports several predefined functions that can be invoked to perform standard fMRI analysis on the stored data sets. A key feature of the implementation is the use of remote analysis servers to do the actual processing of the data. Because of this, a significant reduction in processing time, from 1.5 hours to around 7 minutes using sample data sets, was attained.