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Belarusian NREN BASNET as a Base for Telemedicine and Grid Projects for Improvement of Making the Cancer Diagnosis

Uladzimir Anishchanka (BASNET)

Operating the Computer Network of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus - BASNET is one of factors for successful development of telemedicine system projects in Belarus, giving social and economic benefits across a national scale. On the other hand telemedicine systems define characteristics and, as a rule, dictate increased requirements to network service quality. Network technologies are presented for support of four telemedicine systems, directed on improvement of diagnostics for cancer diseases, and, first of all, in frontier areas with Ukraine, appeared in a zone of the greatest radioactive pollution after Chernobyl NPP accident. 1. Information telemedicine technology for the diagnosis of childhood cancer diseases, based on comprehensive evaluation of a set of tumour cell features was developed in Belarus in 2003-2006. On a joint of medicine and computer science the new information and telemedicine systems extremely necessary for maintenance of practical and scientific activity of doctors, working in the field of childhood oncology and epidemiology, and also for the further development of educational technologies and communications between experts were created and approved in practice. Algorithms and software for supporting the system of remote diagnostics and electronic consultations via Internet with national and foreign medical centers in the field of children’s oncology were developed. 2. Telemedicine fluorography system for city of Minsk (population – 1 million 800 thousand). In 2006-2008 the real time distributed telemedicine system on a digital fluorography was created based on the Minsk Central Anti-Tuberculosis Clinic and 12 city polyclinics of Minsk. The above mentioned medical institutions were united in the uniform corporate telecommunication network using xDSL technology. The created fluorography telemedicine system is the multitask corporate system combining as high requirements to network and information components (a broadband access to the large databases), and also to computing (adaptive) component, implementing a procedure of logic conclusion, mastering and monitoring of the information, imitating modeling and playing of scenarios. 3. Telemedicine system for address emergency and planned advisory specialized medical help to the population suffered from accident on the Chernobyl NPP. Main purposes of the system (created in 2007-2009) are quality improvement, increase of efficiency of diagnostics and treatment for the Belarus population from regions injured with Chernobyl accident. The specified purposes are reached by maintenance of interaction for public health service establishments of various levels and regions, and also by using a knowledge potential of leading medical experts of Belarus via tools of telemedicine technologies. Target group of the telemedicine system for address emergency and planned advisory specialized medical help is the population living in the most polluted areas of the Gomel, Mogilyov and Brest regions. 4. Belarusian national “SKIF-GRID” program stipulates creating of experimental infrastructure for bioinformatics and medicine applications. The national grid net consists of two segments. The first segment is based on gLite middleware for integrating resources with international grid-infrastructures. The second one is based on UniCore middleware for national grid net implementation. “SKIF-GRID” program also stipulate integration various grid-segments with pan-European grid nets in framework of BalticGrid-II Project. National research network BASNET has become a full participant of TERENA and an associate member of GEANT3 project. This will speed up integrating Belarusian research and education networks with pan-European research high-bandwidth telecommunication infrastructure. Development of infrastructure for application design is started in following area: high-energy physics, mechanical engineering, bioinformatics and medicine, material science. All these actions permit development and deployment of transnational application as international scientific collaboration. Based on the mentioned telemedicine systems, bioinformatics and medicine applications based on GRID technology are developing for: - Solving the time-consuming biomedical image computing tasks with an emphasis to the lung cancer diagnosis using CT images; - Exploring, retrieval and mining biomedical regularities in large national-wide databases of lung images. The applications are assuming an adaptation of original biomedical image analysis methods to the GRID environment and an integrating into the GRID the basic pattern recognition and data mining capabilities.