Problem Solving Environment for Medical Image Analysis

The development of Medical Image Analysis (MIA) applications that can successfully be applied in clinical practice is difficult for several reasons, one of them being the large amount and variety of resources involved (people, data, methods, computing). The application goes through several phases (development, parameter optimization, evaluation and clinical deployment) usually supported by different systems. The lack of support for information flow from phase to phase puts extra logistics burden on the lifecycle of MIA applications. In this paper we describe our first efforts to develop a Problem Solving Environment (PSE) for MIA applications using the three systems available at the proof-of-concept environment of the Virtual Laboratory for e-Sciences project. The proposed PSE implements data provenance mechanisms that support information flow among systems, facilitating navigation across phases of the application lifecycle.