The Northeast Biomedical High Performance Computing Collaborative

“Biomedical Informatics is at an exciting cross roads: the computational challenges facing researchers, clinicians and public health professionals now exceed the computational power typically available in an academic biomedical setting. This is exciting because it means that the advances in high performance computing from other disciplines (e.g. physics) can be brought to bear on the great challenges of life sciences, health and medical research. The opportunities to develop new therapies, monitor trends in ambulatory hospital data and catch and avert drug related mishaps (e.g. Vioxx) are truly astounding. With the advent of the $1,000 “ome” (genotype, phenotype, labs) – the capacity to analyze and predict longitudinally and in real time as well as the ability to hypothesis test retrospectively will challenge the computational boundaries of all biomedical research organizations. Computational power is now at the very core or our ability to rapidly advance the state of clinical care and healthcare.”
Article
John Halamka, Life as a Healthcare CIO, 8 October 2008

SHARE the Journey: A European Healthgrid Roadmap

“Grid technology, one of the key technologies for the ‘European Research Area’, offers rapid computation, large scale data storage and flexible collaboration by harnessing together the power of large numbers of computers, from end-users’ desktops to powerful workstations and clusters of more powerful machines.”
Report
Mark Olive, Hanene Rahmouni and Tony Solomonides based on I. Andoulsi; I. Blanquer; V. Breton ; A. Dobrev; C. Van Doosselaere; V. Hernandez; J. Herveg; N. Jacq; Y. Legré; M. Olive; H. Rahmouni; T. Solomonides; K. Stroetmann; V. Stroetmann; P. Wilson, European Commission, October 2008

Storing the Data Deluge

“If two trillion filing cabinets—or one billion terabytes—sounds like too much data to deal with, brace yourself. According to industry experts, health care data is increasing at such a rapid rate that by 2010, medical centers will need to be equipped to hold this massive volume of information. This exponential growth of data is straining storage and long-term archiving resources, says IBM’s Dr. Richard Bakalar, chief medical officer.”
Article
Cindy Atoji, Digital Healthcare & Productivity, 29 July 2008

Grids & e-Health

“This week, I attended Healthcare Computing 2008 to get an update on the current state of e-health in the UK and to explore how grid technology can contribute. Health Informatics is a broad subject and it isn’t possible to engage with the whole field, but I see three main areas of potential engagement.”
Article
Dave Berry, Distributed Thinking, 25 April 2008

Improving Healthcare Middleware Standards with Semantic methods and technologies

Abstract:
A critical issue in healthcare informatics is to facilitate the integration and interoperability of applications. This goal can be achieved through an open architecture based on a middleware independent from specific applications; useful for working with existing systems, as well as for the integration of new systems. Several standard organizations are making efforts toward this target. This work is based on the EN 12967-1,2,3, developed by CEN, that follows the ODP (Open Distributed Processing) methodology, providing a specification of distributed systems based on the definition of five viewpoints. However, only the three upper viewpoints are used to produce EN 12967, the two lower viewpoints should be considered in the implementation context. We are using Semantic Grid for lower views and Semantic Web and Web Services for the definition of the upper views. We analyze benefits of using these methods and technologies and expose methodology for the development of this semantic healthcare middleware observing European Standards.

Isabel Román^a,b, Jorge Calvillo^b,a, Laura M. Roa^a,b and Germán Madinabeitia^a
a University of Seville, Spain
^b CIBER-BBN, Seville, Spain

To be published in “Medical and Care Compunetics 5″, IOSPress, 2008.
To be presented at the ICMCC Event 2008.

IBM Speeds Personalized Therapies

Grid-enabled tools vastly improve microarray analysis.
Article
Catherine Vermazis, Bio IT World, March 2008

UNM Health Sciences plans $15.5 million telehealth grid

“The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center’s Center for Telehealth and Cybermedicine Research has been awarded $15.5 million from the Federal Communications Commission for the design, construction, operation and evaluation of a Southwest Telehealth Access Grid.”
Article
New Mexico Business Weekly, 29 February 2008

Mit dem Grid gegen den Krebs

IBM and Cancer Institute of New Jersey want to use GRID technology to better predict outcome of cancer medication, fine tune therapy and develop new drugs.

Article (German)
Heise Online, 27 January 2008