Towards Production-level Cardiac Image Analysis with Grids

Production exploitation of cardiac image analysis tools is hampered by the lack of proper IT infrastructure in health institutions, the non trivial integration of heterogeneous codes in coherent analysis procedures, and the need to achieve complete automation of these methods. HealthGrids are promising technologies to address these difficulties. This paper details how they can be complemented by high level problem solving environments such as workflow managers to improve the performance of applications both in terms of execution time and robustness of results. Two of the most important important cardiac image analysis tasks are considered, namely myocardium segmentation and motion estimation in a 4D sequence. Results are shown on the corresponding pipelines, using two different execution environments on the EGEE grid production infrastructure.