neuGRID · A GRID-BASED e-INFRASTRUCTURE FOR DATA ARCHIVING/COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTATIONALLY INTENSIVE APPLICATIONS IN THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

Aim of this proposal is to deploy e-Infrastructures (EC-funded MammoGrid and AddNeuroMed's NeuBase) to enable the European neuroscience community to carry out research required for the pressing study of degenerative brain diseases to build a new user-friendly Grid-based research e-Infrastructure (neuGRID), where the collection/archiving of large amounts of imaging data is paired with computationally intensive data analyses. This proposal will initially provide neuroscientists with the capability to identify neurodegenerative disease markers through the analysis of 3D magnetic resonance brain images via the provision of sets of distributed medical and Grid services and later to provide a general, expandable infrastructure of services for other medical applications. neuGRID will be compliant with acknowledged EU and international standards regarding data collection, data management, and Grid construction. Of the two deployed infrastructure, MammoGrid will provide knowledge related to the middleware and upperware that will allow applications to talk to the Grid, and AddNeuroMed that related to the collection/archiving/retrieval of multicentre clinical data, biomedical images and computerized image analysis. Key research challenges will be: the gridification of algorithm pipelines for brain image analysis, the development of a mid-layer of services between user-facing and grid-facing services to make the infrastructure expandable to a number of algorithm pipelines, and testing and validation of the prototype infrastructure. neuGRID aims to become the Google for Brain Imaging", providing a centrally-managed, easy-to-use set of tools with which scientists can perform analyses and collaborate."