New imaging technologies significantly affect diagnostic and prognostic accuracy and facilitate progress towards the cure of brain diseases, in particular Alzheimer’s disease. However, the impact of these new technologies largely depends on the speed and reliability with which the imaging data can be visualized, analyzed and interpreted.
The combination of medical imaging with Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) has demonstrated the potential to make a significant impact in the translation of medical imaging research from the lab into clinical practice.
As shown on the figure below, N4U users a state-of-the-art 3-tier architecture to deliver computing and storage resources to users:
1. Access points: users only interact with high-level tools (such as web portals) called gateways
2. Computing resources: gateways submit image analysis tasks to a pipeline service deployed on DCI computing resources
3. Storage resources: gateways and tasks generated by image analysis pipelines store and retrieve data on DCI resources.