MedIGrid: a medical imaging environment based on a grid computing infrastructure

A high performance, freely accessible medical image processing environment based on a distributed architecture is presented: MedlGrid is the result of a joined interaction between scientists devoted to the design and deployment of new and efficient tomographic reconstruction techniques, researchers in the field of distributed and parallel architectures, and physicians interested in experimenting with new advances in the field of image reconstruction and analysis. The main goal of the project was to design an easily accessible and usable environment with which the medical community can experiment on one side, and that research groups can use as a reference or as a basis for continuing research on the other side. The outcome of this work consists of a prototypal grid infrastructure along with an open and distributed software environment. The grid computing architecture includes a storage server, a high performance parallel computing unit, and two PCs that act as clients to the system and that are located in geographically distant areas. The Globus Toolkit has been chosen to implement the middleware between hardware and software. The latter consists of a set of tools and strategies to reconstruct, display, analyze as well as store, share, distribute and organize medical images, addressing the major problems in the field of image reconstruction and processing. It is platform independent, remotely executable, freely downloadable and accessible, and based on open source code.