The initiative
Concepts :: The Vision :: Missions :: Tools
Concepts
The HealthGrid initiative, supported by the HealthGrid association since 2003, was created to bring a long-term continuity, to reinforce and to promote awareness of the possibilities and advantages linked to the deployment of Grid technologies in health at the planet level. The HealthGrid community consists of over 1000 members from about 50 countries around the world.
The association works indeed for the initiative and the projects in which the association is involved and makes the initiative grow up.
Make use of the new information technologies in order to provide to the patients a less expensive, faster and more efficient individualised healthcare is HealthGrid's main goal.
What is e-health?
e-health originates from the use of information technology in healthcare sector. It is not only a strategy for improving healthcare quality, but also a good business as it tends to become the third industrial pillar of healthcare after the pharmaceutical and the medical imaging devices industries.
e-health is also a term used to describe the "Internet Medicine" or medicine related to the use of computers as electronic technologies in medical area. It is a recent term for healthcare practice supported by electronic processes and communication. In ICT (Information and Communication Technology) applied research, e-health represents a major societal and economical challenge addressed by developing an intelligent environment that enables ubiquitous management of citizen's health status and assists health professionals in their clinical practice. The "e" of "e-health" can be also interpreted as "easy" or "efficient" for the resulting gains in terms of efficiency and productivity.
Source: JMIR- Journal of Medical Internet Research.
What is a Grid?
The name of Grid comes from the metaphor of "Electrical Grids" and the idea to get access to a resource by using a plug. Grid technologies emerged from specific needs in particle physics for high-computing intensive applications and from the availability of high-speed and high-bandwidth networks. Initially, Grids appeared in 1965 from the picture of "computing as an utility", but the concept has been quickly evolving in the last 10 years to reach a high level of maturity in the field of distributed computing and data management. In 2002, the concept of grids for health (healthgrid) was created following an impulsion given by the European Commission in order to create an innovative use of this emerging information technology to support broad access to rapid, cost-effective and high quality healthcare.
In general, Grid computing aims at the provision of a global ICT infrastructure that will enable a coordinated, flexible, and secure sharing of diverse resources, including computers, applications, data, storage, networks, and scientific instruments across dynamic and geographically dispersed organisations and communities (Virtual Organisations or VO).The architecture structuring the grid is made of fundamental components and describes how these components should interact with one another.
Grid computing is an exciting new technology promising to revolutionise many services already offered by the Internet. Grids are defined as a fully distributed, dynamically reconfigurable, scalable and autonomous infrastructure to provide location independent, pervasive, reliable, secure and efficient access to a coordinated set of services encapsulating and virtualizing resource. This new paradigm offers rapid computation, large-scale data storage and flexible collaboration by harnessing together the power of a large number of commodity computers or clusters of other basic machines. The grid was devised for use in scientific fields, such as particle physics and bioinformatics, in which large volumes of data, or very rapid processing, or both, are necessary. Unsurprisingly, the grid has also been used in a number of ambitious medical and healthcare applications such as MammoGrid or Health-e-Child. The Grid is used for medical purposes for providing resources to the medical personnel, which can be either computational resources, storage devices or human resources.
Four big ideas are composing the concept of "Grid":
- the share of resources;
- the security with trust between resources providers and users;
- the resources load balance for a more efficient use of computers;
- the distance that no longer matters between communication networks;
The GRID technology could also be a technological answer to address, among others, the following challenges:
- Support the multiple laboratories collecting genomics and post-genomics data around Europe and willing to analyse them in an up-to-date and competitive environment;
- Provide the large computation power required in medical informatics;
- Ease the access to data and computing power for both scientist and medical staff;
- Provide a knowledge environment to federate informations at all levels, from molecular data to population;
- ...
Sources: JMIR- Journal of Medical Internet Research, Gridcafe, the European Network of excellence “CoreGrid” and the SHARE Roadmap.
What are Healthgrids?
Healthgrids are Grid infrastructures comprising applications, services or middleware components that deal with the specific problems arising in the processing of biomedical data. Resources in Healthgrids are databases, computing power, medical expertise and even medical devices. Healthgrid are then closely related to e-health.
Healthgrids can be seen here as environments where data of medical interest can be stored, processed and made easily available to the different healthcare participants.
The Grid is a "work in progress" as it has been, up to now, developed by hundreds of researchers and software engineers around the world.
The HealthGrid space represents today some of the most interesting drivers for progress in knowledge-based ubiquitous and transparent computing.
Hereafter, some key features about Healthgrids:
- Healthgrids are closely related to data, but many hospitals are reluctant to let the information flow outside the hospital bounds;
- The management of Distributed Databases and the Data Mining capabilities are important tools for many biomedical applications;
- Security in Grid infrastructures is sufficient for research, but it must be improved in the future to ensure privacy of data;
- The robustness and Fault Tolerance of Grids fits very well to the needs for "always on" medical applications;
- The research communities in biocomputing (or biomodelling) and simulation have a strong need for resources that can be provided through the Grid;
- Flexibility is needed for the control of Virtual Organizations at a large level.
HealthGrid White Paper
The HealthGrid association is already identified at a world level as a key actor of the Grid deployment in healthcare, in particular participating in the EGEE and other international projects since the beginning. The edition of the HealthGrid White Paper in 2004 has strengthened this international dimension with contributions from more than 40 experts from Europe, Asia and North America and by the setup of the HealthGrid.US Alliance (www.healthgrid.us) in 2007. The HealthGrid White Paper sets out for senior decision makers the concept, benefits and opportunities offered by applying newly emerging grid technologies in a number of different applications in healthcare.
You can download the full (66 pages) or short version (32 pages) of the white paper.
- Full Version (PDF – 489 Ko)
- Short Version (PDF – 570 Ko)
SHARE Roadmap
Starting from the conclusions of the HealthGrid White Paper and from the user community requirements, the SHARE project has identified the important milestones towards wide deployment and adoption of healthgrids in Europe and has devised a strategy to address the issues identified in the action plan for a European e-Health.
You can download the full (89 pages) or short version (36 pages) of the SHARE roadmap.
- Full Version (PDF – 1.4 Mo - 100 Pages)
- Short Version made available by the European Commission in the publication SHARE the journey - A European Healthgrid Roadmap. (PDF – 2.3 Mo – 36 pages)
Conclusion
Healthgrids are virtuous circles starting from the patient and going back to the patient through the use of computing ICTs and involving stored data.
From this circles, all levels of the human being are represented: starting from the largest population, through the patient as individual and its constitutive elements (tissues, organs and cells), to finally the smallest molecule found in the human body (DNA, protein…).
The analysis of all these data requires their association, their simulation and modelling in order to define a virtual recommendation to support the individualised healthcare.
The Vision
The initiative long term vision is to gather all the community composed of researchers, physicians and industries who want to apply the grid technology into biomedical research and healthcare. Beyond this human adventure, HealthGrid wants to pave the way to built an operational and sustainable grid infrastructure for health in Europe and worldwide.
This idea of bringing together specialists in the healthcare sector and scientists started in 2002 after a meeting organised by the European Commission regarding the enhancement of new technologies use in the healthcare sector. There were indeed at the time a great interest in the development of grid technologies and in the development of computing tools of tomorrow. To face this reality, the European Commission decided to organise a meeting for finding the means and the people ready to be involved in this initiative.
The aim is to favor the development and deployment of grid technologies for healthcare and biomedical research. As the HealthGrid initiative is to use all the benefits of IT and e-health, the vision is to create a single Healthgrid, which shall be oriented to individualised healthcare as well as to epidemiology analysis.
Missions
To enhance...
The first mission for HealthGrid is to improve the biomedical research and healthcare services delivery. Different ways are taken to reach this goal:
- influence Grid technologies and related advanced informatics innovations;
- find out particular ways to apply HealthGrid technologies and by this way always improve the healthcare results;
- make always more possible the exchange of information and to improve open access.
To create...
The second mission for HealthGrid is to create an open collaborative virtual Community.
This Community is composed of people coming from different backgrounds (like researchers or physicians) but also all the people interested in the HealthGrid enhancing, that means to say healthcare professionals, supporters, sponsors, academic, commercial and government organisation.
This collaborative work is made of universal benefit and same vision. All this collaborative work also includes other organisations sharing the same vision or working in the same way.
To communicate...
The third main mission is to communicate the collective knowledge of the HealthGrid community.
This mission is professionaly oriented and is underlying the fact that people involved in the initiative are as important as the IT development. Therefore, this mission include:
- the coordination of professionals meetings, workshops and publications;
- the tests and validation of HealthGrid standards, applications and implementations;
- to make recommendations to government and professionals forums on health architecture.
- to list the grid services and tools in a common repository accessible by the community: the Knowledge Base
Tools used by the initiative
Wiki
The HealthGrid Wiki is a dynamic website where any visitor can make unlimited changes to the page content. Not only communication and quick dissemination of information about projects is allowed but also an organisation of such information in a structured way to ease the navigation. The HealthGrid Wiki is a composed of:
- A public zone where members of the community are encouraged to share informations and results about their projects;
- A number of private zones made available to members of European projects and requiring login/password.
Forge
The Trac server of the HealthGrid association is a collaborative space made available to projects within the HealthGrid community. This is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects.
Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. The goal is is to help developers by providing them the following services:
- Source code browser to efficiently navigate the subversion, track changes… ;
- Integrated wiki presenting structured informations about projects;
- Timeline to show all current and past project events in order, making the acquisition of an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy;
- Roadmap to show the road ahead, listing the upcoming milestones.
- Bug reporting tools to describe project issues
The Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base is a real efficient and easy-use tool and is open to promote projects and events into the healthcare sector and biomedical research. It is acting as a basis for improving coordination amongst the funding bodies. It provides a specific framework for exchanging best practices and experience and translates well the idea of defining a structured collection of records of data.
The Knowledge Base will overall be used to roadmap the challenges to come. Following the e-Health action plan, the Knowledge Base will provide a specific framework for exchanging best practices and experience, and enables common approaches to shared problems to be developed over time. This action plan in question wants to develop two vital points which are maximising new information and communication technologies in health sector and integrating a range of e-Health policies and activities.
The Knowledge Base will also act as a basis for improving coordination amongst funding bodies, health policy makers and leaders of Grid initiatives, avoiding legislative barriers. In that case, the proposed project will therefore:
- develop a comprehensive compendium of national and EU initiatives including an analysis of strengths;
- identify common interests, co-operation incentives and collaboration among the funding authorities, to facilitate pooling of results, best practice and evaluation methods, as well as a more coherent approach towards standardisation and international collaboration.
Surveys
The HealthGrid Surveys is a simple interface to manage web-based surveys and questionnaires. The system hosts intuitive, powerful, online question-and-answer surveys that can work for tens to thousands of participants.
Main features of the system are:
- Unlimited number of surveys at the same time
- Unlimited number of questions in a survey (only limited by your database)
- Unlimited number of participants to a survey
- Creation of a printable survey version
- Enhanced import and export functions to text, CSV, PDF, SPSS, R, queXML and MS Excel format
- Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility
- …
Gallery
The HealthGrid Gallery is online photo album organizer to share pictures from the HealthGrid community and projects.
Last update: 03 November 2011
Breaking News
2011-06-17
Bringing life to the grid
Last month marked another step forward for the European Grid Infrastructure as they signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Life Science Grid Community (LSGC). The MoU … [More]
Event in the spotlight
2011-06-17
HealthGrid 2011 - Bristol (UK) - June 27-28, 2011
Every year, this conference offers the opportunity to share ideas and discuss the state of the art for the integration of grid and cloud practices and e-infrastructures into the fi … [More]
Books
From Grid to Healthgrid - Proceedings of Healthgrid 20 [...]
[Publisher: IOS Press / ISBN: 978-1-58603-510-5] This publication provides a forum for projects in the medical, biological and biomedical domains as well as for grid projects that … [More]
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