title: Using the grid to analyze the pharmacokinetic modelling after contrast administration in dynamic MRI.
abstract: The analysis of the angiogenesis in hepatic lesions is an important marker of tumour aggressiveness and response to therapy. However, the quantitative analysis of this fact requires a deep knowledge of the hepatic perfusion. The development of pharmacokinetic models constitutes a very valuable tool, but it is computationally intensive. Moreover, abdominal imaging processing increases the computational requirements since the movement of the patient makes images in a time series incomparable, requiring a previous pre-processing. This work presents a Grid environment developed to deal with the computational demand of pharmacokinetic modelling. This article proposes and implements a four-level software architecture that provides a simple interface to the user and deals transparently with the complexity of Grid environment. The four layers implemented are: Grid Layer (the closest to the Grid infrastructure), the Gate-to- Grid (which transforms the user requests to Grid operations), the Web Services layer (which provides a simple, standard and ubiquitous interface to the user) and the Application Layer. An application has been developed on top of this architecture to manage the execution of multi-parametric groups of co-registration actions on a large set of medical images. The execution has been performed on the EGEE Grid infrastructure. The application is platform-independent and can be used from any computer without special requirements.
authors.affiliation: Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Ignacio
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Blanquer
authors.forename: Vicente
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Hernández
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Monleón
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carbonell
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Moratal
authors.forename: Bernardo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Celda
authors.forename: Montse
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Robles
authors.forename: Luis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Martí-Bonmatí
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D003287:Contrast Media / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000493:pharmacokinetics*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D010599:Pharmacokinetics; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D003287:Contrast Media