Creating virtual storages and searching DICOM medical images through a grid middleware based in OGSA

Most medical imaging departments of hospital and primary care services in developed countries have migrated in the last years to full digital storing, management and processing. The availability of clinical medical images is larger than ever, but the exploitation of its intrinsic knowledge is poor. Hospitals, clinics and primary care centres store the information locally with a poor degree of interoperability. Although current archiving, flow-control and processing means and protocols of PACS are successful for reporting and patient follow-up, the archiving systems are not designed to exchange interesting cases, to search by medical content or to aggregate epidemiological information. This article presents a Middleware based on Grid Technologies that addresses the problem of sharing, transferring and processing DICOM medical images in a distributed environment. It tackles the problem of incompatibilities by providing a virtual storage that builds-up virtual repositories integrating different individual and incompatible storages providing global searching, progressive transmission, automatic encryption and pseudo-anonimisation and a hook to remote processing services. Users from a virtual organisation can share the cases that arc relevant for their topic of research, epidemiological study or even deeper analysis of a complex individual case. The article describes the architecture, the technologies used, the problems faced and the solutions proposed, and the results in the form of a brief performance analysis and several snapshots.