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A Secure Grid Medical Data Manager Interfaced to the gLite Middleware

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Abstract

The medical community is producing and manipulating a tremendous volume of digital data for which computerized archiving, processing and analysis is needed. Grid infrastructures are promising for dealing with challenges arising in computerized medicine but the manipulation of medical data on such infrastructures faces both the problem of interconnecting medical information systems to Grid middlewares and of preserving patients’ privacy in a wide and distributed multi-user system. These constraints are often limiting the use of Grids for manipulating sensitive medical data. This paper describes our design of a medical data management system taking advantage of the advanced gLite data management services, developed in the context of the EGEE project, to fulfill the stringent needs of the medical community. It ensures medical data protection through strict data access control, anonymization and encryption. The multi-level access control provides the flexibility needed for implementing complex medical use-cases. Data anonymization prevents the exposure of most sensitive data to unauthorized users, and data encryption guarantees data protection even when it is stored at remote sites. Moreover, the developed prototype provides a Grid storage resource manager (SRM) interface to standard medical DICOM servers thereby enabling transparent access to medical data without interfering with medical practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. I3S laboratory, CNRS, Nice, France

    Johan Montagnat, Romain Texier & Diane Lingrand

  2. CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

    Ákos Frohner, Peter Kunszt, Birger Koblitz, Nuno Santos, Ricardo Brito Da Rocha & Antonio Sobreira de Almeida

  3. LAL laboratory, CNRS, Paris, France

    Daniel Jouvenot & Charles Loomis

  4. CREATIS laboratory, CNRS, Lyon, France

    Christophe Pera

  5. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Patrick Guio

  6. STA SZTAKI, Budapest, Hungary

    Zoltán Farkas

Authors
  1. Johan Montagnat
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  2. Ákos Frohner
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  3. Daniel Jouvenot
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  4. Christophe Pera
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  5. Peter Kunszt
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  6. Birger Koblitz
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  7. Nuno Santos
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  8. Charles Loomis
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  9. Romain Texier
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  10. Diane Lingrand
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  11. Patrick Guio
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  12. Ricardo Brito Da Rocha
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  13. Antonio Sobreira de Almeida
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  14. Zoltán Farkas
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Correspondence to Johan Montagnat.

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Montagnat, J., Frohner, Á., Jouvenot, D. et al. A Secure Grid Medical Data Manager Interfaced to the gLite Middleware. J Grid Computing 6, 45–59 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-007-9088-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-007-9088-2

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