A Prototype Infrastructure for the Secure Aggregation of Imaging and Pathology Data for Colorectal Cancer Care

In recent years, a significant number of developments across a broad range of disciplines have allowed researchers and clinicians to start to build up a picture of cancer development. In this paper we report upon the development of a prototype of a secure distributed infrastructure that links imaging data from pathology and radiology. The intention is that a fully-developed system will be capable of supporting studies that will examine whether prognostic and diagnostic features which are apparent in histopathological sections and clinical scans are related. Further, these studies will consider whether these features can be meaningfully linked into a diagnostic or predictive profile. The project in which the prototype is being developed naturally involves a large degree of cooperation across various disciplines. The focus of this paper is primarily on the development of the underlying prototype infrastructure.