Nuclear medicine image management system for storage and sharing by using grid services and semantic web

Large amounts of images (SPECT, PET, scintigraphy) in the nuclear medicine field have been routinely produced in the last decades. In this paper we propose an image management system that allows nuclear medicine physicians to share the acquired images and the associated metadata both locally (i.e. within the same medical institute) and globally with other nuclear medicine physicians located anywhere in the world by using GRID services for data (LFC) and metadata (AMGA) storage. The proposed system guarantees medical data protection by anonymization that removes most sensitive data for unauthorized users, and encryption, that guarantees data protection when it is stored at remote sites. Another important issue is that often nuclear medicine data is associated with other medical data (e.g. neurological data) for diagnosis and therapy follow-up. In order to correlate images with other clinical information, the common metadata are enriched by developing a controlled vocabulary, which integrates known standards such as FOAF, CCR and GeneOntology. All the metadata are stored in an RDF (Resource Description Framework) repository in order to make the system fully compatible with existing metadata storage systems following the semantic web's philosophy.