The increasing volume of data describing human disease processes and the growing complexity of understanding, managing, and sharing such data presents a huge challenge for clinicians and medical researchers. This paper presents the @neurIST system, which provides an infrastructure for biomedical research while aiding clinical care, by bringing together heterogeneous data and complex processing and computing services. Although @neurIST targets the investigation and treatment of cerebral aneurysms, the system's architecture is generic enough that it could be adapted to the treatment of other diseases. Innovations in @neurIST include confining the patient data pertaining to aneurysms inside a single environment that offers clinicians the tools to analyze and interpret patient data and make use of knowledge-based guidance in planning their treatment. Medical researchers gain access to a critical mass of aneurysm related data due to the system's ability to federate distributed information sources. A semantically mediated grid infrastructure ensures that both clinicians and researchers are able to seamlessly access and work on data that is distributed across multiple sites in a secure way in addition to providing computing resources on demand for performing computationally intensive simulations for treatment planning and research.

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Service-oriented Grid technologies are increasingly utilized for the realization of future biomedical IT infrastructures since they offer unprecedented opportunities for the integration of advanced analysis and simulation applications as well as distributed heterogeneous data sources and information systems. The European Union's @neurIST project is developing a Grid-based IT infrastructure for the management of all processes linked to research, diagnosis, and treatment development for complex and multifactorial diseases encompassing data repositories, computational analysis services, and information systems handling multiscale, multimodal information at distributed sites. This paper provides an overview of the @neurIST Grid middleware and outlines the infrastructure offered for the provision of advanced compute and data services to support computationally demanding modeling and simulation tasks and to access heterogeneous distributed data sources through semantic integration.

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