A Framework Based on Web Services and Grid Technologies for Medical Image Registration

Medical Imaging implies executing complex post-processing tasks such as segmentation, rendering or registration which requires resources that exceeds the capabilities of conventional systems. The usage of Grid Technologies can be an efficient solution, increasing the production time of shared resources. However, the difficulties on the use of Grid technologies have reduced its spreading outside of the scientific arena.

This article tackles the problem of using Grid Technologies for the co-registration of a series of volumetric medical images. The co-registration of time series of images is a needed pre-processing task when analysing the evolution of the diffusion of contrast agents. This processing requires large computational resources and cannot be tackled efficiently on an individual basis. This article proposes and implements a four-level software architecture that provides a simple interface to the user and deals transparently with the complexity of Grid environment. The four layers implemented are: Grid Layer (the closest to the Grid infrastructure), the Gate-to-Grid (which transforms the user requests to Grid operations), the Web Services layer (which provides a simple, standard and ubiquitous interface to the user) and the application layer.

An application has been developed on top of this architecture to manage the execution of multi-parametric groups of co-registration actions on a large set of medical images. The execution has been performed on the EGEE Grid infrastructure. The application is platform-independent and can be used from any computer without special requirements.