1.6 Biomedical research  (Page 5/5)

The limiting issue of GATE right now is its time consuming simulations for modeling realistic scans or treatment planning. A secured web platform enabling medical physicists and physicians to use grid technology to compute treatment planning using GATE Monte Carlo simulations and share medical data has been developed. This platform, the Hospital Platform for E-health (HOPE, Diarena et al. 2008) provides quick, secure and easy to use tools to physicians or medical physicists to perform treatment planning on the Grid infrastructure. When the user is logged in, he/she has the possibility to upload or access medical data located on the hospital’s PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) server In the case of medical imaging for radiotherapy, the metadata server (AMGA) services located at the hospital collect metadata as attributes like the name of the patient, the characteristics of the disease, etc. SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connections in addition to encryption systems are used for the transfer of data. Authentication using ACLs (Access Control Lists) are used for the access to metadata in the database. The metadata server provides a replication layer which makes databases locally available to user jobs and replicates the changes between the different participating databases. Information contained in electronic patient sheets is also registered as parameters in the metadata server. The anonymized medical images are registered on the grid. GridFTP (File Transfer Protocol) is used to enable advanced security transfers. Medical images are associated with patient sheets and the user can automatically visualize them.

By visualizing the tumour, the physician can choose what kind of device is the most appropriate to treat the patient using ionizing particles (field size, type of particle, energy, brachytherapy sources, ...). The treatment plans can be directly visualized from the HOPE portal and downloaded onto the personal computer of the user. The web portal offers to the user a transparent and secure way to create, submit and manage GATE simulations using realistic scans in a grid environment. The conviviality of the web portal and the Grid performances could make it possible, in the near future, to use Monte Carlo simulations from clinical centres or hospitals to treat patients in routine clinical practice for specific radiotherapy treatments. In addition, the web platform functionalities enable direct access to medical data (patient sheets, images...) and secure sharing between two users located in different hospitals.

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