Designing Grid-enabled Image Registration Services for MIAKT

The MIAKT project aims to develop collaborative problem solving environments in medical informatics with particular application to the management of breast cancer. This paper presents a framework of image registration Grid services that forms the key components of this project. In this work, the concept of web services was used to encapsulate the registration grid applications for better interoperability. Globus and Condor were jointly used to exploit their complementary features. A workflow was designed for management of the image registration jobs. The initial experiments in 3D breast magnetic resonance (MR) images have shown encouraging results and demonstrated the suitability of Grid technology to this type of computationally intensive applications. The image registration Grid makes it much more straightforward for different institutes to use identical registration program and protocols to register images consistently, quickly and efficiently. This can greatly improve data sharing and comparative studies in multi-center trials. The Grid presented here could be an important step for clinical applications of image registration.