HOPE (HOspital Platform for E-health)
The goal was to deploy a web platform using grid technolgies to support broad access to rapid, cost-effective and high quality healthcare. Such platform, named HOPE, create an environment where data of medical interest can be stored, processed and made easily available to the different actors of healthcare: physicians, medical physicists, healthcare administrations and, of course, citizens.
The HOPE prototype platform was designed to enable telemedicine and calculations in a grid environment. The sharing of knowledge and the exchange of diagnosis between physicians contribute to the improvement of the standard of medical knowledge, particularly in developing countries. Special care has been given to the design of a user-friendly interface dedicated to any medical speciality on the basis of feedback from healthcare professionals. The goal was to create a natural workflow that will enable easy searching, adding, updating, sharing and discussing clinical exams and their attached images.
In addition, with the objective of making Monte Carlo dose computations become standard for radiotherapy quality assurance, planning and plan optimisation, the international collaboration OpenGATE (http://www.opengatecollaboration.org) participate to the development of a Monte Carlo platform dedicated to SPECT, TEP, radiotherapy and brachytherapy simulations. As the grid showed a significant added value in reducing the computing time of GATE simulations, the next step was to develop adequate functionalities on the HOPE platform to enable medical physicists, physicians and researchers to compute GATE treatment planning using grid facilities.
Medical data management demands high level standards in terms of security and data privacy both concerning data access policy and data security on the grid.
To guarantee this high-level of security, we developed our platform keeping in mind some main requirements:
- User authentication using both grid certificates and professional smart card,
- Local and inter-hospital communications encrypted using SSL,
- Fine-grained user authorization policy based on AMGA ACL mechanism,
- Medical images stored anonymized and encrypted on the grid.
As a consequence, the web platform HOPE was designed to offer a complete, transparent and secure way to manage medical data files containing images, physician’s prescription and treatment plans.
As an objective, the conviviality of the web portal and the Grid performances could enable, in a near future, the usage of HOPE in clinical routine.
Lydia Maigne, Université Blaise Pascal