Grid Meter » Grid In Radiology

January 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Grid In Radiology

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In an interesting bit of news today out of the United Arab Emirates, Kodak highlights new additions to its CARESTREAM Radiology Solutions. From the article:

Kodak's newest PACS (picture archiving and communications system) platform will support workflow grid computing, which facilitates storage and retrieval of information throughout an enterprise with a shared infrastructure that can serve multiple sites.

A bit closer to home

Stephan G. Erberich, details the MEDICUS project, a Globus Incubator project for radiology data distribution and medical image archiving.

The thing that I really liked to hear, and it was reflected in both of these stories, is that it is not just about speeding up a computational process, and it's not just about moving and sharing data, it's about workflow, and making a process that encompasses several, often amorphously defined tasks, work better. One of the perceived weakness of Grid, in that it is difficult to define, may very well make it well suited to workflow processes that are often just as difficult to define.

Stephan G. Erberich encapsulates this very well when he says:

And you have to understand, radiology it's not only a science, but it's also an art, so every radiologist prefers to have his own set of tools to read images.

It's very difficult to define workflow in an artistic sense, but at least in the case of MEDICUS, it is an application that Grid seems to be well suited for.

I keep harping on finding that killer commercial application for Grid. Radiology, and it's associated suite of applications coupled with an integrated workflow makes a pretty good case.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 29, 2007 11:57 AM

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