  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.
