Can cloud technology help cancer?

Cancer, Europe's second largest killer and one of the most difficult diseases to treat, could have had a silent prayer answered. Cloud services provided over grid technology are helping to treat cancer patients, thanks to an enormous effort by European researchers working closely with industry.

There are dozens of therapeutic protocols designed to respond to the vast diversity of cases that confront doctors. Radiotherapy has proven a particularly effective treatment - here a linear accelerator, or Linacs in the jargon, attacks the cancer directly by delivering radiation from several directions. The trouble is, the treatment is complex - the direction, size and duration of dosages are all tailored to each case, and must be recalculated every time via simulation.

What's worse is that it's complicated, meaning it requires a lengthy processing time, so much so that it can mean delays and this has the knock-on impact of lowering the number of patients who can be treated by each Linacs machine.

Faster diagnoses would help, but the required computing power is expensive, dramatically increasing the Linacs installation and operation costs.

Cloud computing steps in

But now, there could be an answer to the problems suffered with radiotherapy - the answer could be cloud computing. A cloud computing solution for radiotherapy developed by the BEinGRID project uses a computer grid. This type of infrastructure can share out resources like processors, storage, networking and software, wherever they are and on whatever platform.

Grids can deliver on-demand hardware and software, and because they are combined into a super system, they offer much more power at lower cost.

The individual elements of the system are hidden in the cloud, invisible to the user. The new RadiotherapyGrid delivers two services: treatment plan verification and search. The search function is optimised to provide alternative treatment plans based on the patient scan, treatment prescriptions and other constraints, ICT Results reports.

Both services can run in the background, the doctor simply enters the details in a browser window, and is alerted by email when the results are ready. Security and Service Level Agreements (SSLAs) are a particular focus of the Radiotherapy Grid.

Grids excel at delivering these kinds of benefits, because they ensure that resources are used to the maximum of their capacity. Security can be guaranteed because the computers on the grid behave like a single supercomputer.

Enormous computing resources

The upshot is that doctors can call on enormous computing resources without paying the full costs. It offers better performance, delivering faster results, and only when the service is required. Hospitals do not have to pay when the machines are idle.

"The system can also be extended and adapted, to use new algorithms when new techniques and protocols are developed," reveals Andrés Gómez Tato, a BEinGRID Business Experiment manager from CESGA, one of BEinGRID's partner.

The BEinGRID partners in the radiotherapy application are now looking to exploit the service commercially, and they believe the market is very promising. Initially, the RadiotherapyGrid will be primarily marketed as a 'software-as-a-service' platform at these institutions, but ultimately it may also come with hardware.

Moreover, the RadiotherapyGrid could be applied to other treatment modalities, like the Image Guided Radiotherapy (IGRT), hadrontherapy or brachiatherapy.

The RadiotherapyGrid has demonstrated the power, security and reliability of the cloud for the health sector, while another demonstration, the TravelCRMGrid service, demonstrates the power of the cloud's collaboration and information sharing potential in tourism.

Advantages for the cloud?

Cloud services, however, are not just for healthcare. The power, security, reliability and collaborative advantages of grids could offer cloud services to any industry sector. In fact, BEinGrid developed 25 Business Experiments in various industrial sectors to demonstrate to SMEs the power of cloud computing.

The RadiotherapyGrid has demonstrated the power, security and reliability of the cloud for the health sector, while another demonstration, the TravelCRMGrid service, demonstrates the power of the cloud's collaboration and information sharing potential in tourism.

This push could be just what the healthcare industry needs, as it's been questioned whether cloud computing is benefical to healthcare, as the Data Management Healthcheck 2010 survey, carried out by BridgeHead Software, found only 6.5 percent of healthcare respondents said cloud storage is currently part of their strategy for storage of archived data, eHealth Europe reported.

The power, security, reliability and collaborative advantages of grids could offer cloud services to any industry sector. The pros and cons on cloud computing are going to be continuously debated in all sectors, only time will tell if it will catch on in healthcare.

 

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