USING DICOM IN MEDICAL GRIDS: SECURE IMAGE COMMUNICATION AND INTEGRATION OF EXTERNAL DICOM DEVICES IN GLOBUS GRIDS

摘要

The technological and scientific advances in life sciences increase the demand on computing power and storage capacity. Such new requirements can be met by Grid-computing, the collaboration of distributed resources across institutional borders. This article focuses on the integration of DICOM as world-wide standard for medical imaging systems into a Globus grid environment. Globus is one of the most popular grid toolkits available today. A grid version of the DICOM implementation (Grid-DICOM) is developed by adaption to the Globus grid security interface (GSI). Furthermore, the development of a Grid-DICOM router enables a seamless integration of legacy DICOM devices like image archives (PACS) and other medical imaging systems. A web-based portal allows user-friendly access to these systems and other DICOM operations in the grid. A prototype of this DICOM image transfer service is installed and tested in MediGRID, the German grid network for life sciences. First runtime tests demonstrate the seamless integration, but reveal slightly higher transfer times compared to conventional DICOM transfer due to the additional security layer.