The medical imaging community faces new challenges coming from (i) the amount of data to process (the yearly production of images in a radiological department sums up to tens of TB of data), (ii) the distribution of data (widespreading of data sources over the territory) and (iii) its heterogeneity (lack of well established standards), confidentiality and complex structure. Grid have been identified as a tool able to process large medical databases, enabling large scale applications such as epidemiology, statistical study over populations, medical simulation or research on rare diseases. This project aims at developing grid infrastructures tackling the needs of the medical imaging community and deploying applications demonstrating the relevance of grids for this challenging application area. The program of work will benefit from our former experience acguired in the context of the MEDIGRID, AGIR and EGEE (biomedical applications) projects in particular. Development will particularly target the Grid5000 grid infrastructure.
HIPCAL is a research project funded by the "High Performance Computing and Simulation" program (CIS) of the French National Research Agency (ANR). HIPCAL studies a new paradigm (grid substrate) based on confined virtual cluster concept for resource control in grids. In particular, we propose to study and implement new approaches for bandwidth sharing and end to end network quality of service guarantees. The goal of this project is to explore an approach in a break with current services-oriented principles developed in grids to jointly enhance the application portability, the communication's performance control and their security. The proposal will be validated and evaluated at different scales on the Grid5000 testbed with biomedical applications, demanding in security, performance and reliability.
In this project, our role is to develop medicl image databases analysis application use cases. The federation of full databases, as needed in many challenging medical studies require the federation of full databases over geographically distributed data sources (data virtualization). The setting up of such data and compute intensive applications involves (i) massive intensive (ii) secured, and (iii) efficient data transports between data centers and computing resources. Although grid computing tackles large image databases processing needs, the effective control of the data flow involved when applying multiple and concurent processings on data distributed over different sites remains an opened research area. Indeed, medical image databases represent gigabytes of data to process (a single image represents tens to hundred of megabytes). Moreover, data confidentiality needs to be preserved when data is transported from acquisition sources to processing sites and for storage of intermediate computing results to fulfill patients privacy requirements. Finally, The acceptation of computerized medical analysis procedures and their practical deployment in clinical environments requires limited response times (often in the order of minutes at most).
In particular, we envisage applications to anatomical atlases computations, medical image analysis algorithms validation, or image databases indexing. The funded engineer will work on defining precise use cases, especially taking into account network requirements. He/She will then deploy medical image analysis applications procedures on the experimental infrastruture set, based on previous works realized by the I3S laboratory and its partners. The envisaged data-parallel applications are:
The hired engineer will work in an active research environment. He/She will have to adapt to the broad spectrum of technologies used. His/Her work will involve collaboration with a large national consortium involved. The work will require some travelling, to participate to meetings related to the project (in France) and scientific conferences (international).
To apply, send your CV and recommandations to:
Johan Montagnat | mail: | johan@i3s.unice.fr | |
EPU | tél: | (+33) 492 96 51 03 | |
930 route des Colles | web: | http://www.i3s.unice.fr/~johan/ | |
BP 145 | |||
06903 Sophia Antipolis Cedex |