The increasing volume of data describing human disease processes and the growing complexity of understanding, managing, and sharing such data presents a huge challenge for clinicians and medical researchers. This paper presents the @neurIST system, which provides an infrastructure for biomedical research while aiding clinical care, by bringing together heterogeneous data and complex processing and computing services. Although @neurIST targets the investigation and treatment of cerebral aneurysms, the system's architecture is generic enough that it could be adapted to the treatment of other diseases. Innovations in @neurIST include confining the patient data pertaining to aneurysms inside a single environment that offers clinicians the tools to analyze and interpret patient data and make use of knowledge-based guidance in planning their treatment. Medical researchers gain access to a critical mass of aneurysm related data due to the system's ability to federate distributed information sources. A semantically mediated grid infrastructure ensures that both clinicians and researchers are able to seamlessly access and work on data that is distributed across multiple sites in a secure way in addition to providing computing resources on demand for performing computationally intensive simulations for treatment planning and research.

In multi-institutional medical research, identity and access management is crucial because of the sensitiveness of the medical data which is made available to distinct stakeholders with unique interests residing in different administrative domains as well as countries. Identity and access management in such a setting is twofold and should provide access to federated medical data spread across multiple sites to medical professionals while at the same time protect the privacy of the patients – whose medical data is used for research purposes – by pseudonymization. This paper discusses the identity and access management approach developed in the @neurIST project which deals with the study and treatment of cerebral aneurysms. @neurIST aims at developing a decision support system and a research infrastructure that unites multiple medical institutions and service providers offering technical solutions based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm for treating and researching diseases. The system developed within @neurIST adopts claim-based security models to implement an efficient identity and access management for data access in the @neurIST service ecosystem and pseudonymization technologies to protect the patients' privacy.

Access to Web Services via Web front-ends provides all the advantages related to browser-based thin clients and is therefore a common setting. However, providing end-to-end security between Web browsers and Web Services is currently not feasible due to the inadequate support for Web Service Security in Web browsers. Moreover, the current SOAP APIs offered by the major browsers are incompatible with one another making the task of providing a uniform solution to address this problem difficult. This paper describes a method by which the Web Service communication between a Web browser and a Web Service is protected end-to-end using Web Service Security thereby providing a means to overcome this limitation.

We present an emerging approach of Mobile Social Spaces (MOSS) that intends to improve the ways in which people communicate in the modern world. Pervasive content and service creation and provisioning, in particular for dynamically changing social groups, is a complex task and subject to varying locations of individuals, of the complete group and its context. MOSS tries to remove some of the obstacles in this area and defines a range of functionalities that will support dynamic ubiquitous creation and instantiation of community content and services.

This paper presents the system architecture of the @neurIST project, which aims at supporting the research and treatment of cerebral aneurysms by bringing together heterogeneous data, computing and complex processing services. The architecture is generic enough to adapt it to the treatment of other diseases beyond cerebral aneurysms. The paper describes the generic requirements of the system and presents the architecture, applications and middleware technologies used to realise the system and highlights the innovations in @neurIST.

This paper presents the security architecture of the @neurIST medical information system. @neurIST aims at a research and decision support system for treating diseases that unites multiple medical institutions and service providers offering technical solutions based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. The security architecture provides secure access to federated medical data spread across multiple sites and protects the privacy of the patients by pseudonymisation of the medical data required for the study.

This paper presents an overview of computerised decision support for clinical practice. The concept of computer-interpretable guidelines is introduced in the context of the @neurIST project, which aims at supporting the research and treatment of asymptomatic unruptured cerebral aneurysms by bringing together heterogeneous data, computing and complex processing services. The architecture is generic enough to adapt it to the treatment of other diseases beyond cerebral aneurysms. The paper reviews the generic requirements of the @neurIST system and presents the innovative work in distributing executable clinical guidelines.