HealthGrid 2011

27th & 28th June 2011

Bristol UK

The Ninth HealthGrid conference will take place in Bristol at the Frenchay Campus of the University of the West of England (UK) from Monday 27th to Tuesday 28th June 2011.

A healthgrid is an environment that allows sharing of resources, in which heterogeneous and dispersed health data as well as applications can be accessed by users according to their level of authorization. Consequently, issues such as security and management of private data represent some of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of grid technology as the IT infrastructure for healthcare.

Cloud computing has emerged as a model for enabling convenient, on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction, thus addressing ‘business issues’ in a way that parallels the success of grids in scientific domains. Thus cloud computing poses obvious challenges and opportunities for public health informatics, among them the need for secure communications and storage especially when public health data is collected and transmitted using non-healthcare infrastructure.

One of the biggest challenges in healthcare is the integration and analysis of disparate data coming, for instance, from genomics and proteomics experiments, as well as from clinical investigations (e.g. medical images and electronic patient records) in order to discover correlations among clinical data and genetic assessment. Many computer tools, methods and platforms for the seamless integration of biomedical data and bioinformatics tools are already available and these need large computing power in areas such as:

• The medical image processing community that is facing a growing need to analyse 2D, 3D and 4D images in order to realistically simulate medical treatments or surgery (radiotherapy, restorative surgery, etc), and to develop computer aided surgery;
• Integration of results and easy access by physicians to all of their patients’ medical data on demand.

There is a tremendous potential for end-users in many fields of science, such as bioinformatics and biomedicine, to routinely conduct large scale computations on distributed resources by using a combination of the following technologies:

• Distributed middleware for connecting data/cluster computing centres: this includes grid computing middleware for user’s authentication and accounting, remote job submission, resource scheduling and/or reservation, and data management;
• Virtualization technologies capable of providing on demand application-specific execution environments: this involves a style of computing, cloud computing, in which on-demand resources are provided as a service over the Internet.