HealthGrid 2010 Conference held in Paris France

I've just returned from a trip to Europe where I attended the HealthGrid 2010 Conference held in Paris France at the Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire of the Université Paris-Sud 11.  The HealthGrid Conferences, of which the recent meeting was the 8th annual, are sponsored by the not-for-profit HealthGrid Association based in France and devoted to promoting the use of grid technologies in health care and life sciences (see the organization's HealthGrid White Paper for more information). 

The 3-day conference was attended by investigators who are actively engaged in developing new infrastructures, tools and applications for the health grid and who participated in lively discussions at both the formal sessions and informal meals.  Since I am especially interested in brain imaging informatics (see my presentations downloadable from the Docs page), I'll highlight here several conference papers that were presented on neuroscience applications. These papers demonstrate the growing importance of the use of the web and grid for helping to decipher the mysteries of the brain. 

Ashiq Anjum et al presented their work on the neuGrid Project with a paper entitled "Research Traceability using Provenance Services for Biomedical Analysis". They reported on the development of a data analysis workflow tracking system for Alzheimer's disease MR and CT imaging that was based on CRISTAL and developed to be compliant with the Open Provenance Model.  Franck Michel et al focused their paper entitled "Grid-wide Neuroimaging Data Federation in the Context of the NeuroLog Project" on the architectural design of a data management layer for federating neuroscience resources published by 5 different research centers. The distributed databases in their system contain structural MR images for Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis and stroke patients.  N. Bard et al turned their attention to the study of genotype-phenotype relationships in their paper entitled "Decrypthon Grid - Grid Resources Dedicated to Neuromuscular Disorders" with its presentation of grid software and an example application project called SM2PH-db.

The full proceedings of the conference are available as a book entitled "Healthgrid Applications and Core Technologies: Proceedings of HealthGrid 2010" from IOS Press.  I'll close this post with a collection of photos taken from the Gala Dinner held June 29 at the Restaurant Relais des Chartreux. If you'd like to receive a high-quality copy of any of the photos below, please contact me and I'll be happy to send you the hi-res 2560 x 1920 pixel version.