Use of Data Provenance and the Grid in Medical Image Analysis and Drug Discovery - An IXI Exemplar

Medical research and drug discovery rely increasingly on comparisons between magnetic resonance images from large numbers of subjects, often with multiple time points for each subject. We applied image registration and visualisation techniques for quantitative and qualitative assessment of changes over time in an experimental model of rheumatoid arthritis. We used the Grid to enable remote invocation and parallel execution of the algorithms. Data provenance was stored in a database to provide information about the validity, accuracy and timeliness of the data, which establishes a data integrity framework that is very important in the process of drug discovery and development.