A service oriented analysis environment for neuroimaging studies

neuGRID is an EC-funded project driven by the needs of the Alzheimer's disease research community that aims to facilitate the collection and archiving of large amounts of imaging data coupled with a set of generalized services and algorithms. By taking Alzheimer's disease as an exemplar, the neuGRID project has developed a set of generic analysis services and a Grid infrastructure that enables the European neuroscience community to carry out research required for the study of degenerative brain diseases. Using the services and the infrastructure, neuroscientists should be able to more easily identify neurodegenerative disease markers through the analysis of magnetic resonance and other brain imaging. The availability of such image-based disease markers will allow earlier diagnosis and foster the development of new drugs. This paper reports our work on the service oriented analysis environment that has been developed from a study of user requirements and that enables the neuroscience community to conduct and trace analyses for the study of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. We present the salient features, architecture and implementation details of the services that will form an analysis environment. We also describe the functionality and benefits that these services will offer to the medical community in general and neuroimaging analysis in particular.