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High-speed networks for e-Health applications
Andrew Simpson, David Gavaghan,
Lee Momtahan, David Power, Mark Slaymaker
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Outline
• The field of e-Health is a key area in which e-Science and Grid
computing technologies can be deployed in anger—and deliver
genuine benefits
• Essential non-functional concerns, such as security, the expedient
delivery of data and quality of service, make e-Health
applications appropriate candidates for validating and
demonstrating the potential of hybrid optical networks
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Outline
• We have been tasked with demonstrating the benefits of UK
Light in the e-Health arena, and plan to adopt a two-pronged
approach
• The justification for this is that Grid-based e-Health applications
are some distance from being deployed ‘for real’ within the NHS:
there are many technical, social, legal and ethical issues that
must first be overcome
• Thus, one aspect of the task will be the consideration and
documentation of these issues, while the other will be the
utilisation of UK Light to provide tangible benefits to an
e-Health project that is currently ongoing: the Integrative
Biology project
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The generic: issues and use cases
• In considering the generic issues pertaining to the utilisation of
high-speed networks within e-Health applications, we will engage
with the e-Health community to capture potential use cases
• As a motivating example, consider the possibility of remote
breast screening, which is drawn from the experiences of the
e-DiaMoND project
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An example application: remote breast screening
• In the United Kingdom, the Breast Screening Programme (BSP)
currently invites women between the ages of 50 and 64 to attend
a screening session every three years, with subsequent recalls to
an assessment clinic if necessary; approximately 1.5 million
women are screened by the BSP each year
• It is intended that the programme will be extended to include
women up to and including the age of 70 by 2004
• This is expected to lead to an increase in numbers to 2.5 million
women per year by 2005
• Given that by the end of 2005 every woman screened will have
two views per breast taken, this will result in approximately 10
million mammograms per year being taken by the BSP
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An example application: remote breast screening
• It is currently the case that workloads from some clinics are
physically transferred to remote clinics for reading
• In addition, the BSP is exploring the possibility of compensating
for a shortfall in radiologists in the United Kingdom by utilising
appropriate expertise from overseas
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An example application: remote breast screening
• A typical screening centre will screen approximately 100 women per
day: the average woman will be having her fourth scan, so will have
three previous screening sessions’ worth of data
• If a clinic were to subcontract screening work, we can expect that it
would do so on a batch basis, i.e., a day’s work, which is 100 patients’
worth of data: on average, this would mean three previous sets of four
images plus one set of four images, i.e., 16 images, for each patient
• In general, a radiologist will perform in the region of 100 readings per
one-hour session, which amounts to approximately 100GB of data per
reading session
• Many of the ethical, security and technical issues pertaining to this
scenario will be generic
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The generic: ethical issues
• In the UK, raw data, i.e, identifiable patient data can be moved
between clinics if and only if that data is being moved for
someone to review it in the interests of ‘direct care’, i.e., it is
aiding in the treatment of a patient
• Usual data protection rules apply in that the receiver of the data
should only keep what they have been provided for a limited
time (suitable to perform the task being asked to do) and clearly
with a system this would be managed by giving the clinician
temporary rights to do something
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The specific: Integrative Biology
• The Integrative Biology (IB) project involves the use of
state-of-the-art HPC facilities to enable simulation of very
complex biological systems
• For example, certain whole-heart models can involve finite
element meshes with tens of millions of nodes, and up 50
solution variables
• Solution in real-time for just a single heartbeat requires (at
least) millisecond temporal accuracy, resulting in data
generation in the 10–100 Terabyte range from a single simulation
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The specific: Integrative Biology
To make optimal use of HPC facilities the IB project is developing
and extending toolkits to support:
• Computational steering
• Collaborative visualisation
• Performance control
• Data curation
• Data mining
One of the IB project goals is to investigate the potential of using
heterogeneous HPC resources within a single simulation
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The specific: Integrative Biology
• In modelling heart mechanics, the equations that model the
mechanical pumping action are coupled to the electrical activity
generating the muscular contractions via a large system of
ordinary differential equations (up to 50) which model the ion
flows through the cell membrane
• A potentially attractive approach is to solve the ODE systems
on an MPI HPC architecture, whilst simultaneously solving the
mechanical problem on an OpenMP architecture: to make this
approach feasible would require very rapid communications, and
the facility to co-schedule the simulations, between the HPC
resources
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The specific: Integrative Biology
With respect to the possibility of allowing models to be run at more
than one site, even when they are tightly coupled, the extent to
which the benefits outweigh the overheads are open to question (it
requires co-scheduling of resource in different sites): the answering of
this open question will represent a tangible benefit for the IB project
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Tasks
• The collection of use cases and the undertaking of appropriate
analyses to determine the legal, ethical, and technical constraints
involved with the transfer of medical information
• The capture and formal description of non-functional
requirements for the transfer of data within IB
• The development of application-level monitoring software to
monitor adherence to these non-functional requirements within
IB
• The utilisation of some of the IB tools over UK Light to conduct
performance control and collaborative steering
• The documentation of lessons learned from the Integrative
Biology experience to feed back to the wider community
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Wider engagement
• With respect to the generic, we will be seeking engagement with,
and use cases from, the wider e-Health community
• The recently announced MRC-funded e-Science projects are
particularly relevant in this respect
• In addition, we will take advantage of the proposed DTI-funded
KTN for Inter-Enterprise Computing to investigate further links
• With respect to the specific, we will attempt to link to the HPC
group within the ESLEA project, as they are likely to be looking
at similar issues: mutual benefits will accrue as our group
benefits from their expertise and their group benefits from an
additional realistic application for their work
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Summary
• Outline
• The generic: issues and use cases
• An example application: remote breast screening
• The generic: ethical issues
• The specific: Integrative Biology
• Tasks
• Wider engagement