The increasing volume of data describing human disease processes and the growing complexity of understanding, managing, and sharing such data presents a huge challenge for clinicians and medical researchers. This paper presents the @neurIST system, which provides an infrastructure for biomedical research while aiding clinical care, by bringing together heterogeneous data and complex processing and computing services. Although @neurIST targets the investigation and treatment of cerebral aneurysms, the system's architecture is generic enough that it could be adapted to the treatment of other diseases. Innovations in @neurIST include confining the patient data pertaining to aneurysms inside a single environment that offers clinicians the tools to analyze and interpret patient data and make use of knowledge-based guidance in planning their treatment. Medical researchers gain access to a critical mass of aneurysm related data due to the system's ability to federate distributed information sources. A semantically mediated grid infrastructure ensures that both clinicians and researchers are able to seamlessly access and work on data that is distributed across multiple sites in a secure way in addition to providing computing resources on demand for performing computationally intensive simulations for treatment planning and research.
In multi-institutional medical research, identity and access management is crucial because of the sensitiveness of the medical data which is made available to distinct stakeholders with unique interests residing in different administrative domains as well as countries. Identity and access management in such a setting is twofold and should provide access to federated medical data spread across multiple sites to medical professionals while at the same time protect the privacy of the patients -whose medical data is used for research purposes -by pseudonymization.This paper discusses the identity and access management approach developed in the @neurIST project which deals with the study and treatment of cerebral aneurysms. @neurIST aims at developing a decision support system and a research infrastructure that unites multiple medical institutions and service providers offering technical solutions based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm for treating and researching diseases. The system developed within @neurIST adopts claim-based security models to implement an efficient identity and access management for data access in the @neurIST service ecosystem and pseudonymization technologies to protect the patients' privacy.
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