Pervasive Access to MRI Bias Artifact Suppression Service on a Grid

Bias artifact corrupts MRIs in such a way that the image is afflicted by illumination variations. Some of the authors proposed the exponential entropy-driven homomorphic unsharp masking (E
²
D-HUM) algorithm that corrects this artifact without any
a

priori
hypothesis about the tissues or the MRI modality. Moreover, E
²
D-HUM does not care about the body part under examination and does not require any particular training task. People who want to use this algorithm, which is Matlab-based, have to set their own computers in order to execute it. Furthermore, they have to be Matlab-skilled to exploit all the features of the algorithm. In this paper, we propose to make such algorithm available as a service on a grid infrastructure, so that people can use it almost from everywhere, in a pervasive fashion, by means of a suitable user interface running on smartphones. The proposed solution allows physicians to use the E
²
D-HUM algorithm (or any other kind of algorithm, given that it is available as a service on the grid), being it remotely executed somewhere in the grid, and the results are sent back to the user's device. This way, physicians do not need to be aware of how to use Matlab to process their images. The pervasive service provision for medical image enhancement is presented, along with some experimental results obtained using smartphones connected to an existing Globus-based grid infrastructure.