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Valencian Cyberinfrastructure for Oncological Medical Imaging (Ignacio Blanquer - Universidad Politécnica de Valencia)
The generalisation of digital imaging has lead to the availability of a vast amount of knowledge in the form of medical images and reports, which is of enormous relevance to research and training. In these studies, data are retrieved and structured for healthcare delivery, around the identity of the patient. However, research and training requires organizing studies by content, setting up relations among images of similar or related pathologies, or morphological similarities. This cannot be achieved on current image databases, and moreover, the differences among centres will make studies incomparable.
In this scenario, the project CVIMO (http://www.grycap.upv.es/cvimo) “Valencian Cyberinfrastructure for Oncological Medical Imaging (CVIMO GVEMP06/004)”, funded by the Regional Ministry of Industry, University and Science of the Valencian Government, a middleware was developed and tested for sharing images and radiology studies from five hospitals of the Land of Valencia (Quiron Clínic, University Hospital Dr. Peset, de la Ribera Hospital, Valencian Foundation for Oncology and the Research Foundation of la Fe Hospital) with the collaboration of British Telecom. The project was leaded by the “Universidad Politécnica de Valencia” and the scientific coordinator was Vicente Hernández.
This project used the middleware TRENCADIS (Towards a gRid ENvironment for proCessing and shAring DIcom objects), that organises and shares relevant studies selected from different centres, by means of the content of the radiology reports. TRENCADIS aims at supporting research and training, not competing with PACS and RIS systems. TRENCADIS is based on an Open Grid Service-oriented Architecture (OGSA), and uses the standards supported by the scientific and industrial community (such as DICOM, DICOM-SR, XML, https, WS, WSRF, GridFTP, X.509, etc…).
One of the pillars supporting the indexation of CVIMO has been the use of Structured Reports. Hospitals share basic templates, which can be extended for each centre, that code in a machine-understandable and unequivocal way, the information of the evaluation of the radiology expert. This can include post-processing results, such as TNM evaluation or other parameters. Currently, CVIMO was oriented to three oncology pathologies: microcytic and macrocytic lung cancer, liver carcinoma, and tumours of nervous central system. Seven templates for Structured Reports have been defined.
The TRENCADIS environment (figure 1) provides an authorisation schema that automatically scales. Users belong to one or more VOs (Virtual Organization) or VO groups, and each VO group has different permissions for accessing different schema templates. Each schema enables accessing all the images that match the restrictions defined on the schema. For example, a user belonging to the “liver carcinoma” VO group would be able to access to the schema “RMN images of liver carcinoma” that contains the restrictions for filtering from all the available images, only those related to the pathology and the modality. If a new image is uploaded and fits the schema, it automatically becomes available. Other images belonging to other pathologies and body parts would be neither available nor visible.
TRENCADIS uses as back-end different services, including GT4, file systems, relational databases or gLite storage elements and catalogues, and uses AMGA as metadata storage.
Contact: Vicente Hernández, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (vhernand@dsic.upv.es).
Figure 1: The TRENCADIS environment