Abstract

DECIDE (Diagnostic Enhancement of Confidence by an International Distributed Environment), aims at creating a e-Infrastructure to enhance the diagnostic confidence in chronic brain diseases such as Alzheimer and dementia. Proper management of these neurodegenerative diseases are thought to be very important in terms of health-economical point of view. The DECIDE infrastructure will provide the medical community with neuroimaging applications that can take advantage of the use of large reference databases and advanced, computationally intensive algorithms to detect disease biomarkers in individual patients based on structural Magnetic Resonance (MR), functional Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT), and electroencephalographic (EEG) images. The DECIDE infrastructure will be built on different layers: networks, GRID and storages, neuroimaging applications, user-friendly customized GUI. The workplans of RTD and SVC activities explain how the e-Infrastructure will be deployed and validated, whilst the NAs activities will take care of dissemination, training and outreach to the medical community. This infrastructure will enable clinicians from hospitals across the Eeurope not owning large sets of normal subject images or/and not equipped with high computation resources or/and not providing computer-aided sophisticated algorithms to support neurological diagnosis, to carry out analyses, remotely and efficiently, by the use of a centralized, user friendly, web-Grid service. The project would like to exploit the state-of-the-art neuroimaging data acquisition, analysis and grid based technology to reduce the burden of huge cost for the management of the neurodegenerative diseases.