Radiotherapy is one of the most important tools for treating cancer. It involves firing X-rays at the tumour while minimising damage to surrounding healthy tissue and organs. To make sure treatment is as effective as possible, physicians use computer simulations to strike a balance between the length of the treatment and the accuracy of the dose. On doctors' desktop computers, this can take days. Since 2005, RadioTherapyGrid has been using EGEE's computational resources to help speed up this process and optimise the treatments. This has cut the processing time to just an hour ”they will demonstrate their application at the EGEE conference.

The grid offers many advantages to the health community, one of the biggest being its ability to combine data from various sources quickly and securely. This could be of great benefit to doctors around Europe - giving them access to a storehouse of medical imaging data to help them identify and treat a variety of illnesses or particularly unusual conditions that they may not see every day. The sensitivity of this data however, means that any system of this type calls for extremely secure data protection protocols. With this is mind, the Modalis project has developed the Medical Data Manager, an easy-to-use graphical interface with strict data access control and encryption built-in. It is built on the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard used across the globe and could benefit patients around the world.

Also present at the conference, EUAsiaGrid will share their work on modelling and monitoring future flu pandemics. By combining various tools and databases, the system will track changes within the flu virus during a pandemic. The team is working with the current H1N1 outbreak so that they can make an impact on future pandemics.

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