Title: Ontology-based semantic integration scheme for medical image grid

Authors: Hai Jin, Aobing Sun, Ran Zheng, Ruhan He, Qin Zhang

Addresses: Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China. ' Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China. ' Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China. ' Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China. ' Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

Abstract: Ontology is becoming a key for grid platform to support the integration of heterogeneous resources by means of processing resource description and enactment. Medical Image Grid (MedImGrid) aims to access, archive and analyse medical data from distributed healthcare information systems to adapt to the development of healthcare information infrastructure. But the heterogeneities of those systems, especially the semantic gulfs, hamper their interoperations even encapsulated as web services in a grid environment. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based semantic integration scheme for MedImGrid, which adopts a hybrid method to create a MedImGrid semantic environment and unifies its information exchange model with Health Level 7 v3 protocol. The MedImGrid ontologies share the same lexicon to simplify the semantic transformation within a distributed environment. The ontology-based semantic integration components are also designed to support the semantic interoperations of MedImGrid. We test the performances of our scheme with simulation experiments to evaluate the feasibility of our approaches.

Keywords: semantic integration; MedImGrid; medical image grid; hybrid ontologies; HL7 protocol; health level 7 protocol; medical images; distributed information systems; healthcare information systems; grid computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2009.022025

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2009 Vol.1 No.2, pp.86 - 97

Published online: 16 Dec 2008 *

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