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Objectives: Grid-based technologies are emerging as potential solutions for managing and collaborating distributed resources in the biomedical domain. Few examples exist, however, of successful implementations of Grid-enabled medical systems and even fewer have been deployed for evaluation in practice. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the use in clinical practice of a Grid-based imaging prototype and to establish directions for engineering future medical Grid developments and their subsequent deployment. Method: The MammoGrid project has deployed a prototype system for clinicians using the Grid as its information infrastructure. To assist in the specification of the system requirements (and for the first time in healthgrid applications), use-case modelling has been carried out in close collaboration with clinicians and radiologists who had no prior experience of this modelling technique. A critical qualitative and, where possible, quantitative analysis of the MammoGrid prototype is presented leading to a set of recommendations from the delivery of the first deployed Grid-based medical imaging application. Results: We report critically on the application of software engineering techniques in the specification and implementation of the MammoGrid project and show that use-case modelling is a suitable vehicle for representing medical requirements and for communicating effectively with the clinical community. This paper also discusses the practical advantages and limitations of applying the Grid to real-life clinical applications and presents the consequent lessons learned., Comment: 18 pages, 2 tables, 5 figures. In press International Journal of Medical Informatics. Elsevier publishers

The MammoGrid project has deployed its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based Grid application in a real environment comprising actual participating hospitals. The resultant setup is currently being exploited to conduct rigorous in-house tests in the first phase before handing over the setup to the actual clinicians to get their feedback. This paper elaborates the deployment details and the experiences acquired during this phase of the project. Finally the strategy regarding migration to an upcoming middleware from EGEE project will be described. This paper concludes by highlighting some of the potential areas of future work., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by the 2005 HealthGrid Conference

The storage and manipulation of digital images and the analysis of the information held in those images are essential requirements for next-generation medical information systems. The medical community has been exploring collaborative approaches for managing image data and exchanging knowledge and Grid technology [1] is a promising approach to enabling distributed analysis across medical institutions and for developing new collaborative and cooperative approaches for image analysis without the necessity for clinicians to co-locate. The EU-funded MammoGrid project [2] is one example of this and it aims to develop a Europe-wide database of mammograms to support effective co-working between healthcare professionals across the EU. The MammoGrid prototype comprises a high-quality clinician visualization workstation (for data acquisition and inspection), a DICOM-compliant interface to a set of medical services (annotation, security, image analysis, data storage and querying services) residing on a so-called Grid-box and secure access to a network of other Grid-boxes connected through Grid middleware. One of the main deliverables of the project is a Grid-enabled infrastructure that manages federated mammogram databases across Europe. This paper outlines the MammoGrid Information Infrastructure (MII) for meta-data analysis and knowledge discovery in the medical imaging domain., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

The MammoGrid project aims to prove that Grid infrastructures can be used for collaborative clinical analysis of database-resident but geographically distributed medical images. This requires: a) the provision of a clinician-facing front-end workstation and b) the ability to service real-world clinician queries across a distributed and federated database. The MammoGrid project will prove the viability of the Grid by harnessing its power to enable radiologists from geographically dispersed hospitals to share standardized mammograms, to compare diagnoses (with and without computer aided detection of tumours) and to perform sophisticated epidemiological studies across national boundaries. This paper outlines the approach taken in MammoGrid to seamlessly connect radiologist workstations across a Grid using an "information infrastructure" and a DICOM-compliant object model residing in multiple distributed data stores in Italy and the UK, Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

The MammoGrid project has recently delivered its first proof-of-concept prototype using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based Grid application to enable distributed computing spanning national borders. The underlying AliEn Grid infrastructure has been selected because of its practicality and because of its emergence as a potential open source standards-based solution for managing and coordinating distributed resources. The resultant prototype is expected to harness the use of huge amounts of medical image data to perform epidemiological studies, advanced image processing, radiographic education and ultimately, tele-diagnosis over communities of medical virtual organisations. The MammoGrid prototype comprises a high-quality clinician visualization workstation used for data acquisition and inspection, a DICOM-compliant interface to a set of medical services (annotation, security, image analysis, data storage and querying services) residing on a so-called Grid-box and secure access to a network of other Grid-boxes connected through Grid middleware. This paper outlines the MammoGrid approach in managing a federation of Grid-connected mammography databases in the context of the recently delivered prototype and will also describe the next phase of prototyping., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures

The past decade has witnessed order of magnitude increases in computing power, data storage capacity and network speed, giving birth to applications which may handle large data volumes of increased complexity, distributed over the Internet. Grids computing promises to resolve many of the difficulties in facilitating medical image analysis to allow radiologists to collaborate without having to co-locate. The EU-funded MammoGrid project aims to investigate the feasibility of developing a Grid-enabled European database of mammograms and provide an information infrastructure which federates multiple mammogram databases. This will enable clinicians to develop new common, collaborative and co-operative approaches to the analysis of mammographic data. This paper focuses on one of the key requirements for large-scale distributed mammogram analysis: resolving queries across a grid-connected federation of images., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. Presented at the 2nd Int Conf on HealthGrids Clermont-Ferrand, France January 2004 and accepted by Methods of Information in Medicine

We quantize the superstring on the AdS_2 x S^2 background with Ramond-Ramond flux using a PSU(1,1|2)/U(1) x U(1) sigma model with a WZ term. One-loop conformal invariance of the model is guaranteed by a general mechanism which holds for coset spaces G/H where G is Ricci-flat and H is the invariant locus of a Z_4 automorphism of G. This mechanism gives conformal theories for the PSU(1,1|2) x PSU(2|2)/SU(2) x SU(2) and PSU(2,2|4)/SO(4,1) x SO(5) coset spaces, suggesting our results might be useful for quantizing the superstring on AdS_3 x S^3 and AdS_5 x S^5 backgrounds., Comment: 34 pages, 4 figures, harvmac big mode ; typos corrected, clarified the choice of the real forms

We construct the scaling limit of the easy axis XXZ chain. This limit is a subtle combination of approaching the isotropic point, and letting the lattice spacing to zero to obtain a continuous model with a finite mass gap. We give the energy difference between the two lowest energy states (the two `vacua') and analyze the structure of the excitation spectrum of the limiting model. We find, that the excitations form two sets corresponding to the two vacua. In both sets the dressed particles are described by Bethe Ansatz like equations (higher level Bethe Ansatz), and the two sets can be distinguished through a parameter entering into these secular equations. The degenerations in the spectrum can be interpreted as originating from an SU(2) symmetry of the dressed particles. The two particle scattering matrices obtained from the secular equations are consistent with this symmetry, and they differ in an overall sign in the two sectors., Comment: 30 pages, RevTeX

The existence of non-local charges, generating a Yangian symmetry is discussed in generalized chiral Gross-Neveu models. Their conservation can be proven by a finite-loop perturbative computation, the order of which is determined from group theoretic constants and is independent of the number of flavors. Examples, where the 1-loop calculation is sufficient, include the SO(n)-models and other more exotic groups and representations., Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX

The two-point functions of the energy-momentum tensor and the Noether current are used to probe the O(3) nonlinear sigma model in an energy range below 10^4 in units of the mass gap $m$. We argue that the form factor approach, with the form factor series trunctated at the 6-particle level, provides an almost exact solution of the model in this energy range. The onset of the (2-loop) perturbative regime is found to occur only at energies around $100m$., Comment: 13 pages LaTex, 4 PostScript figures; version published in Physics Letters B

We study the general structure of Smirnov's axioms on form factors of local operators in integrable models. We find various consistency conditions that the form factor functions have to satisfy. For the special case of the $O(3)$ $\sigma$-model we construct simple polynomial solutions for the operators of the spin-field, current, energy-momentum tensor and topological charge density., Comment: 11 pages, plain LaTeX, KFKI-1994-10/A