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[english] The management and maintenance of paper-based patient record archives involve high running costs. Therefore, many health care providers choose to digitize their paper records subsequently destroying the originals. By now, this is an established procedure for patient records from routine care.However, at present it is unclear under which circumstances the patient records of patients taking part in clinical trials can be destroyed after digitization. Paper-based original records may only be destroyed if their digital copies are recognized as source documents by both sponsors and authorities. The authors believe that this recognition should be possible, as long as the scanned paper-based records fulfill the requirements for certified copies according to the Note for Guidance (ICH-GCP). This requires that, based on the applied rules, it can be proven at any time that the existing digitization process is clearly regulated, and the resulting quality is regularly controlled and sufficiently high.The objective of this key issues paper is to present the manner in which the existing regulatory guidelines can be implemented to allow the digitized patient records being recognized as source documents.An English version of this article will be published in “Clinical Investigation” (Future Science) .[german] Das Verwalten und Vorhalten von Archiven für papierbasierte Patientenakten verursacht hohe laufende Kosten. Viele Gesundheitsversorger sind daher dazu übergegangen, ihre Papierakten in einem Scan-Prozess zu digitalisieren und die Originalakten anschließend zu vernichten. Für die Patientenversorgung hat sich dieses Vorgehen bewährt.Zum gegenwärtigen Zeitpunkt ist jedoch unklar, unter welchen Voraussetzungen Krankenakten von Patienten, die an klinischen Studien teilnehmen, nach dem Digitalisieren vernichtet werden können. Die papierbasierten Originalakten können nur dann vernichtet werden, wenn deren digitale Kopien von Sponsoren und Behörden als Quelldokumente anerkannt werden. Eine solche Anerkennung sollte nach Auffassung der Autoren möglich sein, wenn die gescannten Papierakten die Anforderungen an beglaubigte Kopien entsprechend der Note for Guidance CPMP/ICH/135/95 (ICH-GCP) erfüllen. Dies setzt voraus, dass auf der Basis bestehender Regelungen jederzeit nachgewiesen werden kann, dass der Digitalisierungsprozess klar geregelt ist, dessen Ergebnisqualität regelmäßig überprüft wird und ausreichend hoch ist.Ziel dieses Eckpunktepapiers des Netzwerks der Koordinierungszentren für Klinische Studien (KKSN, ), der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e.V. (GMDS, ) und der TMF – Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e.V. () unter Mitwirkung des Bundesinstituts für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte (BfArM, ) und der Landesüberwachungsbehörde Nordrhein-Westfalen (Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, Gesundheitsamt, Zentrales Inspektorat für klinische Prüfstellen in Nordrhein-Westfalen) ist es daher, darzulegen, wie die bestehenden regulatorischen Vorgaben so umgesetzt werden können, dass digitalisierte Patientenakten als Quelldokumente anerkannt werden.

By abstracting Grid middleware specific considerations from clinical research applications, re-usable services should be developed that will provide generic functionality aimed specifically at medical applications. In the scope of the neuGRID project, generic services are being designed and developed which will be applied to satisfy the requirements of neuroscientists. These services will bring together sources of data and computing elements into a single view as far as applications are concerned, making it possible to cope with centralised, distributed or hybrid data and provide native support for common medical file formats. Services will include querying, provenance, portal, anonymization and pipeline services together with a ‘glueing’ service for connection to Grid services. Thus lower-level services will hide the peculiarities of any specific Grid technology from upper layers, provide application independence and will enable the selection of ‘fit-for-purpose’ infrastructures. This paper outlines the design strategy being followed in neuGRID using the glueing and pipeline services as examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organisation and the conferences HealthGrid 2009 (http://berlin2009.healthgrid.org) is the seventh meeting of this open forum for the integration of grid technologies, e-science and e-health methods and their applications in the biomedical and healthcare domains. The principal objective of the HealthGrid conference and of the HealthGrid Association is the exchange and debate of ideas, technologies, solutions and requirements that interest the grid and the life-science communities and are likely to promote the integration of grids into biomedical research and health in the broadest sense. Participation is encouraged for grid middleware and healthgrid application developers, biomedical and health informatics users, ethicists and security experts, and policy makers to participate in a set of multidisciplinary sessions with a common focus on bringing healthgrids closer to real application in the health domain. HealthGrid conferences have been organized on an annual basis. The first conference, held in 2003 in Lyon (http://lyon2003.healthgrid.org), reflected the need to involve all actors – physicians, scientists and technologists – who might play a role in the application of grid technology to health, whether healthcare or bio-medical research. The second conference, held in Clermont-Ferrand in January 2004 (http://clermont2004.healthgrid.org) reported on the earliest efforts in research, mainly work in progress, from a large number of projects. The third conference in Oxford (http://oxford2005.healthgrid.org) had a major focus on first results and exploration of deployment strategies in healthcare. The fourth conference in Valencia (http://valencia2006.healthgrid.org) aimed at consolidating the collaboration among biologists, healthcare professionals and grid technology experts. The fifth conference in Geneva (http://geneva2007.healthgrid.org) focused on the five domains defined by the European Commission as application areas for ‘vertical integration’ through grids in the biomedical field: molecules, cells, organs, individuals, and populations. For each of these five domains, an invited speaker gave a state of the art address followed by concrete projects. This was a loud signal to the community that the usefulness of grids to potential application domains could be demonstrated at least at the prototype level. This theme was also evident at the sixth conference in Chicago (http://chicago2008.healthgrid.org), which proclaimed its focus as ‘e-Science Meets Biomedical Informatics’. The sixth conference was also a landmark in the history of the organisation HealthGrid – and its newly established affiliate HealthGrid.US – as the first conference to be organised outside Europe. As we put it a year ago, this was a celebration of similarities and differences, a moment to validate models and principles beyond one's familiar shores. The proceedings since the third conference have appeared in the IOS series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics ([1–4]). While the desire to promote healthgrid applications to real healthcare settings remains central to the community's ambitions, it is also true that the majority of adopters work in academic environments where research is their principal preoccupation. This continues to be reflected in the content of the conference. Nevertheless, we may detect a move in this research towards application in medicine and healthcare, an admittedly slower process than the most optimistic projections, but with worthwhile exemplars to motivate researchers, innovators and those who must take and justify investment decisions. The deadline for the Chicago conference proceedings more or less coincided with the announcement – I should say, the shock of the announcement – of Jean-Claude Healy's untimely death. I did not know Jean-Claude personally, although he had made a very deep impression on me on the first occasion I met him: the launch in 2002 of the first explicitly health-focussed grid projects to be funded under the Framework Programme 5 of the European Union. He was always a very busy man, as all his formal and informal obituarists have highlighted, so his welcome and introductory remarks had, to someone who had not met him before, a sense of hurry; one could easily imagine that there was also a committee waiting for him to return so that it could continue its deliberations. But on reflection, this was a wrong impression: the urgency arose from his desire to see results from the projects that had just been approved. What now remains with me from that meeting is the passion of his assertion that, while doctors sometimes appear reluctant to embrace new technologies, the potential of our particular technology, healthgrids, was virtually limitless and that the importance of our projects was that they would demonstrate just how much was possible to an often sceptical medical profession. It is salutary to have h [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parameters of the genome architecture of cell nuclei like copy number changes of genes or numerical and structural aberrations of chromosomes displayed by changes of size, shape, form and geometric arrangement of the related territories and domains play an important role in tumour diagnosis and monitoring of tumour therapy. We have defined data structures for such parameters, accompanied by meta data describing cell biology and microscopy protocols, and developed algorithms to deduce geometric data from microscopic raw images of fluorescently labelled cell nuclei. The statistical evaluation of nucleus geometry and architecture data is a valuable aid for diagnostic decisions and monitoring of cancer development, as indicated by several research case studies. The algorithms and data storage devices are presently administrated by different operating systems. Unification of workflow is being achieved for a local cluster, but gridification is still subject to problems of licensing, monitoring, and administrating systems, including data security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid technologies have proven to be very successful in the area of eScience, and in particular in healthcare applications. But while the applicability of workflow enacting tools for biomedical research has long since been proven, the practical adoption into regular clinical research has some additional challenges in grid context. In this paper, we investigate the case of data monitoring, and how to seamlessly implement the step between a one-time proof-of-concept workflow and high-performance on-line monitoring of data streams, as exemplified by the case of long-running clinical trials. We will present an approach based on proxy services that allows executing single-run workflows repeatedly with little overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments of grid services for secured distributed data management open new perspectives for disease surveillance. In this paper, we report on our initiative to develop a surveillance network for breast cancer in the Auvergne region. The network gathers cytopathology laboratories, structures in charge of cancer screening and institutes in charge of cancer epidemiology. Data stored in cytopathology laboratories are queried through the grid for the purpose of second diagnosis and to produce statistical indicators. The paper describes the network goal and design and discusses specific issues related to patient identification and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present DockFlow, a prototypic version of a PharmaGrid. DockFlow is supporting pharmaceutical research through enabling virtual screening on the Grid. The system was developed in the course of the BRIDGE project funded by the European Commission. Grids have been used before to run compute- and data-intensive virtual screening experiments, like in the WISDOM project. With DockFlow, however, we addressed a variety of problems yet unsolved, like the diversity of results produced by different docking tools. We also addressed the problem of analysing the data produced in a distributed virtual screening system applying a combinatorial docking approach. In DockFlow we worked on a grid-based problem solving environment for virtual screening with the following major features: execution of four different docking services (FlexX, AutoDock, DOCK and GAsDock) at locations in Europe and China remotely from a common workflow, storage of the results in a common Docking Database providing a shared analysis platform for the collaboration partners and combination of the results. The DockFlow prototype is evaluated on two scientific case studies: malaria and avian flu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Production exploitation of cardiac image analysis tools is hampered by the lack of proper IT infrastructure in health institutions, the non trivial integration of heterogeneous codes in coherent analysis procedures, and the need to achieve complete automation of these methods. HealthGrids are promising technologies to address these difficulties. This paper details how they can be complemented by high level problem solving environments such as workflow managers to improve the performance of applications both in terms of execution time and robustness of results. Two of the most important important cardiac image analysis tasks are considered, namely myocardium segmentation and motion estimation in a 4D sequence. Results are shown on the corresponding pipelines, using two different execution environments on the EGEE grid production infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Geneva University Hospitals work is in progress to establish a computing facility for medical image analysis, potentially using several hundreds of desktop computers. Typically, hospitals do not have a computer infrastructure dedicated to research, nor can the data leave the hospital network for the reasons of privacy. For this purpose, a novel batch system called GridFactory has been tested along-side with the well-known batch system Condor. GridFactory's main benefits, compared to other batch systems, lie in its virtualization support and firewall friendliness. The tests involved running visual feature extraction from 50 000 anonymized medical images on a small local grid of 20 desktop computers. A comparisons with a Condor based batch system in the same computers is then presented. The performance of GridFactory is found satisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image processing is known as a computationally expensive and data intensive domain. It is thus well-suited for Grid computing. However, Grid computing usually requires the applications to be designed for parallel processing, which is a challenge for medical imaging researchers in hospitals that are most often not used to this. Making parallel programming methods easier to apply can promote Grid technologies in clinical environments. Readily available, functional tools with an intuitive interface are required to really promote healthgrids. Moreover, the tools need to be well integrated with the Grid infrastructure. To facilitate the adoption of Grids in the Geneva University Hospitals we have set up a develop environment based on the Taverna workflow engine. Its usage with a medical imaging application on the hospitals' internal Grid cluster is presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tensor analysis of diffusion weighted magnetic resonance images is increasingly used for non-invasive tracking of nerve fibers in the human brain. Diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI) enables in-vivo research on the internal structure of the central nervous system, encompassing interconnection of functional areas, correlation between fiber deformations and certain desease patterns, as well as brain tumor localization. But the modeling of the local diffusion parameters is a computationally expensive part of the processing pipeline, resulting to run times up to days on standard desktop computers. A grid implementation of the algorithm with slice based parallelization reduces the processing down to 10% compared to a local cluster and 20% compared to sequential processing on the grid. A workflow implementation enables fault-tolerant handling of temporary failures within the grid. Furthermore, pure web-based access to the grid application allows for collaborative utilitzation even from protected infrastructures, as they are typically found in clinical environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image analysis has been strongly present in several healthgrid initiatives from the start, and today we find many imaging projects with successful grid implementations and developments. An example is the analysis of functional MRI data on grids, which has been successfully realized by several projects and that could be of interest for others. However, crossing the borders of existing grids is not trivial because the infrastructures being created for these projects differ, each adopting a (slightly) different software stack. This paper describes our early attempts to cross the borders between the German and Dutch grid infrastructures for medical imaging, motivated by a true wish to share expertise about fMRI analysis on grids between these two communities. We describe how we used off-the-shelf, production-level, grid technology to implement supporting mechanisms for cooperation in fMRI at several levels (users, data, software, workflows and computing resources). This simple exercise provided us valuable insights into the problems of crossing the borders of real grids from a user's perspective. Besides technical aspects, we observed that security and usability are very important for the success of inter-operation of Healthgrid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sleep related breathing disorders (SRBD) represent a major disease in sleep medicine. For diagnosis and therapy control, extensive overnight investigations are required, encompassing long-term measurement of multiple biosignals in specialized sleep disorders centers. To date, evaluation of the examination is realized by comprehensive visual inspection of the data by an expert. Therefore, many approaches have been made to facilitate diagnosis, among them automated analysis of the ECG signal. In this article, we present a grid based infrastructure for computer aided diagnosis of SRBD, accessible for distributed users. As the analysis algorithms itself are still in a validation phase, and the Grid infrastructure is not approved for clinical applications, the application is currently used for research purposes only. But as important aspects of data-security, accessibility from protected environments, usability and fault-tolerance are already covered, the implementation is a solid base for further enhancement of the platform and paves the way for a sustainable service grid for sleep medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to perform clinical investigations on integrated biomedical data sets and to predict virological and epidemiological outcome, medical experts require an IT-based collaborative environment that provides them a user-friendly space for building and executing their complex studies and workflows on largely available and high-quality data repositories. In this paper, the authors introduce such a novel collaborative working environment a so-called virtual laboratory for clinicians and medical researchers, which allows users to interactively access and browse several biomedical research databases and re-use relevant data sets within own designed experiments. Firstly, technical details on the integration of relevant data resources into the virtual laboratory infrastructure and specifically developed user interfaces are briefly explained. The second part describes research possibilities for medical scientists including potential application fields and benefits as using the virtual laboratory functionalities for a particular exemplary study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genomes are tremendous co-evolutionary holistic systems for molecular storage, processing and fabrication of information. Their system-biological complexity remains, however, still largely mysterious, despite immense sequencing achievements and huge advances in the understanding of the general sequential, three-dimensional and regulatory organization. Here, we present the GLOBE 3D Genome Platform a completely novel grid based virtual “paper” tool and in fact the first system-biological genome browser integrating the holistic complexity of genomes in a single easy comprehensible platform: Based on a detailed study of biophysical and IT requirements, every architectural level from sequence to morphology of one or several genomes can be approached in a real and in a symbolic representation simultaneously and navigated by continuous scale-free zooming within a unique three-dimensional OpenGL and grid driven environment. In principle an unlimited number of multi-dimensional data sets can be visualized, customized in terms of arrangement, shape, colour, and texture etc. as well as accessed and annotated individually or in groups using internal or external data bases/facilities. Any information can be searched and correlated by importing or calculating simple relations in real-time using grid resources. A general correlation and application platform for more complex correlative analysis and a front-end for system-biological simulations both using again the huge capabilities of grid infrastructures is currently under development. Hence, the GLOBE 3D Genome Platform is an example of a grid based approach towards a virtual desktop for genomic work combining the three fundamental distributed resources: i) visual data representation, ii) data access and management, and iii) data analysis and creation. Thus, the GLOBE 3D Genome Platform is the novel system-biology oriented information system urgently needed to access, present, annotate, and to simulate the holistic genome complexity in a unique gateway towards a real understanding, educative presentation and curative manipulation planning of this tremendous evolutionary information grail – genomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detailed numerical simulations of blood flow in arteries with various malformations and its conjugate loads on the vessel walls have been a research topic for specialized medical and engineering communities over decades. The present state of computing resources and software allows access to these elaborate diagnostic and research tools to a broad user circle and even to integrate them into clinical workflows. To tap the full potential of hemodynamic simulations, a Grid-based “virtual vessel surgery” application has been developed and deployed as part of the image processing module of the MediGRID project of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF). The very resource-intensive parts of that application, including not only the numerical simulation itself, but also automated data pre- and post-processing and visualization are implemented and are made available through the MediGRID portal. Some highly interactive workflow steps of the application are left at the user site but automated – via a specially developed Web interface – to a degree allowing intuitive, fast interaction and seamless integration with the Grid components. Standard middleware provided by D-Grid is used throughout. The complete workflow is implemented into the grid and can in principle be carried out using no external software. It was applied to real vessel data with a stenosis and an aneurysm, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The XTENS (eXTensible Environment for NeuroScience) platform consists in an highly extensible environment for collaborative work that improve repeatability of experiment and provides data storage and analysis capabilities. The platform is divided in repository and application domains, branched in services with different purpose. The first domain is the central component of the platform and consists in a multimodal repository with a client-server architecture. The second one provides remote tools for image and signal visualization and analysis. The main issue for such a platform is not only to provide an extensible collaborative environment, but also to build a development platform for testing models and algorithms in neuroscience. For these reasons a Grid approach has been considered. Both computational and data Grids infrastructures can be exploited to analyze and share large datasets of distributed data. The architecture has been deployed to support surgical planning for patients affected by drug resistant epilepsy. In that scenario, a complex analysis for a fully multimodal dataset including different image modalities, EEG and video is required to localize the origin of the ictal discharge and critical brain areas. As first results, prototype versions of both repository and application domain components are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating medical data at inter-centre level implies many challenges that are being tackled from many disciplines and technologies. Medical informatics have applied an important effort on describing and standardizing Electronic Health Records, and specially standardisation has achieved an important extent on Medical Imaging. Grid technologies have been extensively used to deal with multi-domain authorisation issues and to provide single access points for accessing DICOM Medical Images, enabling the access and processing to large repositories of data. However, this approach introduces the challenge of efficiently organising data according to their relevance and interest, in which the medical report is a key factor. The present work shows an approach to efficiently code radiology reports to enable the multi-centre federation of data resources. This approach follows the tree-like structure of DICOM-SR reports in a self-organising metadata catalogue based on AMGA. This approach enables federating different but compatible distributed repositories, automatically reconfiguring the database structure, and preserving the autonomy of each centre in defining the template. Tools developed so far and some performance results are provided to prove the effectiveness of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid technologies have proven to be very successful in the area of eScience, and healthcare in particular, because they allow to easily combine proven solutions for data querying, integration, and analysis into a secure, scalable framework. In order to integrate the services that implement these solutions into a given Grid architecture, some metadata is required, for example information about the low-level access to these services, security information, and some documentation for the user. In this paper, we investigate how relevant metadata can be extracted from a semi-structured textual documentation of the algorithm that is underlying the service, by the use of text mining methods. In particular, we investigate the semi-automatic conversion of functions of the statistical environment R into Grid services as implemented by the GridR tool by the generation of appropriate metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial sustainability is not a driving force of HealthGrids today, as a previous desk research survey of 22 international HealthGrid projects has showed. The majority of applications are project based, which puts a time limit of funding, but also of goals and objectives. Given this situation, we analysed two initiatives, WISDOM and MammoGrid from an economic, cost-benefit perspective, and evaluated the potential for these initiatives to be brought to market as self-financing, sustainable services. We conclude that the topic of HealthGrids should be pursued further because of the substantial potential for net gains to society at large. The most significant hurdle to sustainability – the discrepancy between social benefits and private incentives – can be solved by sound business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Best practice guidance for clinical studies asks investigators to employ the highest possible standards in privacy and consent. When considering the feasibility of a clinical study, issues of privacy extend not only to actual but also to potential study participants. The consent required to access records to determine whether or not an individual might be eligible to participate in a study is sometimes referred to as consent-for-consent. Some initiatives to enhance the efficiency of study-recruitment could compromise consent-for-consent, for example by inviting a patient to take part in a study without the knowledge of their attending clinician. Through iterative working with experts and examination of protocols we explored a range of scenarios for assessing the feasibility of clinical trials and observational studies, and recruiting participants. The main requirement we identified was to speed up feasibility-assessment and recruitment while preserving the patient-clinician trust relationship that is central to consent-for-consent. We present an appropriate information system architecture, FARSITE (Feasibility Assessment and Recruitment System for Improving Trial Efficiency), and show in principle that faster recruitment into clinical studies need not compromise best practice in privacy or consent. We show that FARSITE is a specific instance of an ‘e-Lab’ architecture for assembling data, methods and expertise around study protocols and defined populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability is a top priority for nearly all grid communities. The German grid communities in the area of life sciences are continuing their dissemination efforts in order to bring the grid to scientists. With cloud computing another concept for distributed IT infrastructures is on the rise. In this regard the grid has a different focus and matches better with life science compute power demands. A comparison of both grid and cloud in addition to the background and present status of the German life science grid give a contemporary impression of the future perspectives of MediGRID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The harmonization of data protection law in Europe has been theoretically achieved by means of the EU directive on data protection [1]. In practice the harmonization is not absolute and conflicts continue to exist on the ways member states are implementing the directive. The integration of different European medical systems by means of grid technologies will continue to be challenging if technology does not intervene to enhance interoperability between national regulatory frameworks on data protection. In this paper we present an approach to automate privacy requirements for the sharing of patient data across Europe on a healthgrid [2] domain and ensure its enforcement internally and within external domains where the data might travel. This approach is based on the semantic modelling of privacy obligations that are of legal, ethical or cultural nature. These requirements are for the sharing of personal data between different European member states. Our model reflects both similarities and conflicts, if any, between the different member states. This will allow us to reason on the safeguards a data controller should ask from an organization belonging to another member state before disclosing medical data to them. The system will also generate the relevant set of policies to be enforced at the process level of the grid to ensure privacy compliance before allowing access to the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated care pathways, a fine-grained form of medical guideline including the explicit recording of any deviation, or ‘variance’, have been perceived by some as overly prescriptive, limiting clinical freedom and promoting ‘cookbook medicine’. However, feeding the results of the analysis of variance back into the development of a pathway could be an effective way of capturing evidence from practice. This paper summarizes research into the development and use of ICPs, and includes some initial findings from a qualitative study involving clinicians that have helped develop or have used ICPs professionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid computing initiatives in medicine and life sciences are under pressure to prove their sustainability. While some first business model frameworks were outlined, few practical experiences were considered. This gap has been narrowed by an international survey of 33 grid computing experts with biomedical and non-biomedical background on business aspects. The experts surveyed were cautiously optimistic about a sustainable implementation of grid computing within a mid term timeline. They identified marketable application areas, stated the underlying value proposition, outlined trends and specify critical success factors. From a general perspective of their answers, they provided a stable basis for a road map of sustainable grid computing solutions for medicine and life sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative research can often have demands on finer-grained security that go beyond the authentication-only paradigm as typified by many e-Infrastructure/Grid based solutions. Supporting finer-grained access control is often essential for domains where the specification and subsequent enforcement of authorization policies is needed. The clinical domain is one area in particular where this is so. However it is the case that existing security authorization solutions are fragile, inflexible and difficult to establish and maintain. As a result they often do not meet the needs of real world collaborations where robustness and flexibility of policy specification and enforcement, and ease of maintenance are essential. In this paper we present results of the JISC funded Advanced Grid Authorisation through Semantic Technologies (AGAST) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/agast) and show how semantic-based approaches to security policy specification and enforcement can address many of the limitations with existing security solutions. These are demonstrated into the clinical trials domain through the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/votes) and the epidemiological domain through the JISC funded SeeGEO project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/seegeo). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high throughput framework for virtual screening (VS) applications has been designed which enables researchers in in-silico drug discovery to deploy large scale time-consuming virtual screening experiments on High Performance/Grid computing environments. Issues related to enabling virtual screening on grids have been addressed extensively in the past; in this paper we describe a new framework, which supports the rapid deployment of virtual screening services based on UNICORE-6 and Meta Scheduling Service (MSS). We demonstrate, how the deployment of complex virtual screening workflows is facilitated by this framework and we provide some first results of the virtual laboratory testbed established in the course of the EU project PHOSPHORUS. The flexibility of the new VS framework allows easy deployment and integration of new resources and applications, making the Grid more accessible to the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work we demonstrate the adequacy of revising the classification systems based on molecular phylogenetic calculations by allowing an arbitrary number of taxas that take advantage of high performance computing platforms for the Human papillomavirus (HPV) case. To do so, we have analysed several phylogenetic trees which have been calculated with the PhyloGrid tool, a workflow developed in the framework of the EELA-2 Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clearly defined services with appropriate business models are necessary in order to exploit the benefit of grid computing for industrial and academic users in medicine and life sciences. In the project Services@MediGRID the service engineering approach is used to develop those clearly defined grid services and to provide sustainable business models for their usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the genetics of diseases is entering a new era. Increasingly, genome-wide association studies are being used to identify positions within the human genome that have a link with a disease condition. The number of genomic locations studied means that High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions will have to increasingly be used in the statistical analysis of these data sets. Understanding the biomedical implications of the statistical analysis will also require heavy use of bioinformatics annotation tools. In this paper we report the outcome of developing HPC statistical genetics analysis codes for use by clinical researchers. Statistical results are automatically annotated with relevant biological information by calling multiple web-services orchestrated via pre-existing scientific workflows. Access to the HPC codes and bioinformatics annotation processes is via a client Workbench which hides as much as possible from the user the HPC infrastructure and bioinformatics annotation processes, whilst aiding the exchange of ideas and results between stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grids are key technologies to federate data distributed in multiple neuroscience centers, thus enabling large scale multi-centric studies. However, the take up of these technologies is slow due to the difficulty to manipulate sensitive neuroradiological data in an open environment and the recognized risk of federated sites to loose control over their valuable data. In this paper we propose a distributed data access control policy, enabling the federation of existing data stores, where local security policies prevail, to supports multi-centric neuroscience studies. It achieves a compromise between enabling collaborative work through data sharing and preventing unauthorized access to data in a competitive environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a set of software services for massive mammography image processing by using high-performance parallel computers of SKIF-family which are linked into a service-oriented grid-network. An experience of a prototype system implementation in two medical institutions is also described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With ever-new technologies emerging also the amount of information to be stored and processed is growing exponentially and is believed to be always at the limit. In contrast, however, huge resources are available in the IT sector alike e.g. the renewable energy sector, which are often even not at all used. This under-usage bares any rational especially in the IT sector where e.g. virtualisation and grid approaches could be fast implemented due to the great technical and fast turnover opportunities. Here, we describe this obvious paradox for the first time as the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons, in contrast to the Classical Tragedy of the Commons where resources are overexploited. From this perspective the grid IT sector attempting to share resources for better efficiency, reveals two challenges leading to the heart of the paradox: i) From a macro perspective all grid infrastructures involve not only mere technical solutions but also dominantly all of the autopoietic social sub-systems ranging from religion to policy. ii) On the micro level the individual players and their psychology and risk behaviour are of major importance for acting within the macro autopoietic framework. Thus, the challenges of grid implementation are similar to those of e.g. climate protection. This is well described by the classic Human Ecology triangle and our extension to a rectangle: invironment-individual-society-environment. Extension of this classical interdisciplinary field of basic and applied research to an e-Human Grid Ecology rational, allows the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons of the grid sector to be understood and approached better and implies obvious guidelines in the day-to-day management for grid and other (networked) resources, which is of importance for many fields with similar paradoxes as in (e-)society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]