Gridifying Biomedical Applications in the Health-e-Child Project

Abstract

The Health-e-Child project started in January 2006 with the aim of developing a Grid-based healthcare platform for European paediatrics and providing seamless integration of traditional and emerging sources of biomedical information. The objective of this chapter is to share experiences, and present major issues faced, solutions found and a roadmap for future work in developing the Grid infrastructure for interactive biomedical applications in the project, as Health-e-Child approaches its final phases. This chapter starts with a brief introduction of the project itself, followed by a description of its architecture on the Grid. It then illustrates the approach with the description of a concrete example of one integrated key application, the Health-e-Child CaseReasoner, which is intended for biomedical decision support over the Grid, and is based on similarity search and advanced data visualization techniques.