Grid-Based Computing to Fight Neurological Disease

ScienceDaily — Grid computing, long used by physicists and astronomers to crunch masses of data quickly and efficiently, is making the leap into the world of biomedicine. Supported by EU-funding, researchers have networked hundreds of computers to help find treatments for neurological diseases just as Alzheimer's. They are calling their system the 'Google for brain imaging.'

The Neugrid project

Through the Neugrid project, the pan-European grid computing infrastructure has opened up new channels of innovation into degenerative neurological disorders and other illnesses, during also holding the promise of quicker and more accurate clinical diagnoses of individual patients.

The infrastructure, set up with the support of EUR 2.8 million in funding from the European Commission, was developed over three years by researchers in seven countries. Their aim, primarily, was to give neuroscientists the ability to quickly and efficiently analyse 'Magnetic resonance imaging' scans of the brains of patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Nevertheless their work has as well helped open the door to the use of grid computing for innovation into other neurological disorders, and many other areas of medicine.

The Neugrid team

Five years' work in two weeks The Neugrid team, led by David Manset from MaatG in France and Richard McClatchey from the University of the West of England in Bristol, laid the foundations for the grid infrastructure, starting with five distributed nodes of 100 cores each, interconnected with grid middleware and accessible via the internet with an easy-to-use web browser interface. To test the infrastructure, the team used datasets of images from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative in the United States, the largest public database of MRI scans of patients with Alzheimer's disease and a lesser condition termed 'Mild cognitive impairment'.

Patients with early symptoms have difficulty recalling the names of people and places, remembering recent events and solving simple maths problems. As the brain degenerates, patients in advanced stages of the disease lose mental and physical functions and require round-the-clock care.

Neugrid built on innovation conducted by two prior EU-funded projects: Mammogrid, which set up a grid infrastructure to analyse mammography data, and AddNeuroMed, which sought biomarkers for Alzheimer's. The team are now continuing their work in a series of follow-up projects. An expanded grid and a new paradigm Neugrid for You, a direct continuation of Neugrid, will build upon the grid infrastructure, integrating it with 'High performance computing' and cloud computing resources. Using EUR 3.5 million in European Commission funding, it will as well expand the user services, algorithm pipelines and datasets to establish a virtual laboratory for neuroscientists.

The grid infrastructure

'In Neugrid we built the grid infrastructure, addressing technical challenges just as the interoperability of core computing resources and ensuring the scalability of the architecture. In N4U we will focus on the user-facing side of the infrastructure, particularly the services and tools available to researchers,' Dr. Frisoni says. 'We want to try to make using the infrastructure for technology as simple and easy as possible,' he continues, 'the learning curve should not be much more difficult than learning to use an iPhone!'

N4U will as well expand the grid infrastructure from the initial five computing clusters through connections with CPU nodes at new sites, including 2,500 CPUs recently added in Paris in collaboration with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and in partnership with 'Enabling grids for e-science Biomed VO', a biomedical virtual organisation.

Another follow-up initiative, outGRID, will federate the Neugrid infrastructure, linking it with similar grid computing resources set up in the United States by the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the CBRAIN brain imaging technology platform developed by McGill University in Montreal, Canada. A workshop was recently held at the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations, to foster this effort.

The DECIDE project will address these questions in order to use the grid infrastructure to help doctors treat patients. Even though the main focus of all these new projects is on using grid computing for neuroscience, Dr. Frisoni emphasises that the same infrastructure, architecture and research could be used to enable new technology -- and new, more efficient diagnostic tools -- in other fields of medicine. 'We are helping to lay the foundations for a new paradigm in grid-enabled medical innovation,' he says.