Linux helps medical research: a case study (page 1 of 4)

Dr. Bob Hollebeek, Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of NSCP explains IBM's strategy for Linux in this environment to Rich Berman.

Berman: What were the challenges you were facing at the start of this project?

Dr. Hollebeek: Very simply, we needed to acquire digital patient records and make them available. We focused, initially on mammography.

Mammography is an area that is just converting over from analog to digital methodologies. Interestingly enough, the volume of information generated by these new, digital, mammographic machines is really quite large.

Typically, we measure their output in terabytes, per hospital, per year. Another challenge has been trying to build something that would allow hospitals to securely capture that information from those digital machines without having to deploy really serious databases with the hardware on site.

We have solved that problem with the constraints are that you have to handle really high volumes, and you have to do it at relatively high security levels.

Berman: And how was Linux a solution to the challenges of high volume and high security?

Dr. Hollebeek: We needed a vendor that could deliver all the basic components of a large-scale, on demand solution. The Linux cluster includes software, servers and storage equipment that enables leading edge research and data sharing between healthcare facilities.

We basically built systems that were able to move medical content from one hospital to another while simultaneously satisfying all of the government regulations for security. We also had to build in the work flow requirements within -hospitals such as when you can and cannot move medical information.

This work resulted in what is called NDMA, which stands for National Digital Mammography Archive. The development of NDMA was needed because mammography has an extremely large volume of data files that were often unavailable, leaving radiologists without comparative records for making diagnosis.

Berman: How did the University of Pennsylvania get involved in this project?

Dr. Hollebeek: The University of Pennsylvania helped start NDMA and later decided that this was sufficiently interesting to consider commercializing as a technology transfer. So, over the past year, I have been working with a new company called i3ARCHIVE.

Berman: How does this all come together?

Dr. Hollebeek: i3ARCHIVE now has real hospital clients so we are beginning to bring up hospital systems and provide commercial services to them. The way this is done is to put a very high security but lightweight footprint inside the hospital network.

This "WallPlug system" is capable of interfacing between things that have to happen inside of the hospital and things that need to be transferred to and from the outside. These are the kinds of services that we need in the back-end to build these serious databases. That device is called a wall plug just to evoke the idea that this is something that you can plug into and you get services from.

Berman: Where does Linux play a part in this?

Dr. Hollebeek: Linux is used in two places in the system. The wall plugs are special security devices. Part of that runs Linux. Linux is used there to manage network protocols and do very efficient network transport.

The files we use are fairly large and we want to move them efficiently and rapidly.