New York University
Saturday, 6 September 2008
In conjunction with MICCAI'2008
Medical image computing raises new challenges related to the scale and complexity of the required analysis. An increasing number of studies require the federation of large data sets (epidemiology, statistical analysis, computational anatomy and physiology...). Furthermore, the complexity of models and processing is increasing. Grid technologies are addressing problems related to large data set manipulation over wide Internet and computing networks. Grid infrastructures have been exploited in many scientific areas to foster collaborations at a large scale and address problems that are difficult to tackle using limited resources available in a single center. Grids are not only providing tools for exchanging data and computing power, they are also a vector for structuring the user communities as they enable cross-enterprises collaborations.
In the medical imaging area, grids provide a foundational layer that can be exploited e.g., to build patient-specific models and to reduce computing time for meeting time constraints of clinical practice.
The emergence of grid technologies in the medical area also opens new opportunities such as computing algorithms validation and optimization or collaborative studies on rare diseases. Specific grids initiatives are emerging worldwide, demonstrating a growing interest from the health community for such infrastructures and impacting the way to conduct medical research. Some projects are also targeting large scale data federation and structuring for provision to the community. However, deploying medical image analysis applications on grid infrastructures requires a proper understanding of the specific needs in this area. Close collaboration between grid and medical image analysis researchers is needed.
The scientific objectives of this workshop are both to demonstrate the current achievements of grid technologies within the medical imaging community and to precisely identify the fundamental problems limiting the adoption of existing systems and methods. The workshop intends to help medical imaging scientists to become familiar with grid technologies and their possible usage to support research. It also aims at stimulating the community to build new collaborations by taking advantage of the sharing capabilities of grids.