  The aim of the recently EU-funded MammoGrid project is, in the light of
emerging Grid technology, to develop a European-wide database of mammograms
that will be used to develop a set of important healthcare applications and
investigate the potential of this Grid to support effective co-working between
healthcare professionals throughout the EU. The MammoGrid consortium intends to
use a Grid model to enable distributed computing that spans national borders.
This Grid infrastructure will be used for deploying novel algorithms as
software directly developed or enhanced within the project. Using the MammoGrid
clinicians will be able to harness the use of massive amounts of medical image
data to perform epidemiological studies, advanced image processing,
radiographic education and ultimately, tele-diagnosis over communities of
medical "virtual organisations". This is achieved through the use of
Grid-compliant services [1] for managing (versions of) massively distributed
files of mammograms, for handling the distributed execution of mammograms
analysis software, for the development of Grid-aware algorithms and for the
sharing of resources between multiple collaborating medical centres. All this
is delivered via a novel software and hardware information infrastructure that,
in addition guarantees the integrity and security of the medical data. The
MammoGrid implementation is based on AliEn, a Grid framework developed by the
ALICE Collaboration. AliEn provides a virtual file catalogue that allows
transparent access to distributed data-sets and provides top to bottom
implementation of a lightweight Grid applicable to cases when handling of a
large number of files is required. This paper details the architecture that
will be implemented by the MammoGrid project.
