The increasing volume of data describing human/ndisease processes and the growing complexity of understanding, managing, and sharing such data presents a huge challenge for clinicians and medical researchers. This paper presents the/n@neurIST system, which provides an infrastructure for biomedical research while aiding clinical care, by bringing together heterogeneous data and complex processing and computing services. Although @neurIST targets the investigation and treatment of cerebral aneurysms, the system’s architecture is generic enough that it could be adapted to the treatment of other diseases./nInnovations in @neurIST include confining the patient data pertaining to aneurysms inside a single environment that offers clinicians/nthe tools to analyze and interpret patient data and make use of knowledge-based guidance in planning their treatment. Medical/nresearchers gain access to a critical mass of aneurysm related data due to the system’s ability to federate distributed information/nsources. A semantically mediated grid infrastructure ensures that both clinicians and researchers are able to seamlessly access and/nwork on data that is distributed across multiple sites in a secure way in addition to providing computing resources on demand for/nperforming computationally intensive simulations for treatment planning and research.

This work was supported by the framework of the @neurIST Integrated Project, which is cofinanced by the European Commission under Contract IST-027703.