A Grid Computing Framework For High-Performance Medical Imaging

Current medical image processing has become a complex mixture of many scientific disciplines including mathematics, statistics, physics, and algorithmics, to perform tasks such as registration, segmentation, and visualization, with the ultimate purpose of helping clinicians in their daily routine. This requires high performance computing capabilities that can be achieved in several ways, usually unaffordable for most medical institutions. This paper presents a space-based computational grid that uses the otherwise wasted CPU cycles of a set of personal computers, to provide high-performance medical imaging services over the Internet. By using an existing hardware infrastructure and software of free distribution, the proposed approach is apt for university hospitals and other low-budget institutions. This will be illustrated by the use of three real case studies of services where an important speedup factor has been obtained and whose performance has become suitable for use in real clinical scenarios.