This publication provides a forum for projects in the medical, biological and biomedical domains as well as for grid projects that seek to integrate these. The overall objective is to reinforce and promote the awareness of the deployment of grid technology in health. The emphasis is on results of current grid projects in health care. This will show in the outcome of field tests and will identify deployment strategies for prototype applications in health care. In addition, outstanding problem areas and technological challenges are identified and new solutions to these issues are proposed. From Grid to Healthgrid is divided in four themes: - Knowledge and Data Management - Deployments of Grids in Health - Current Projects and - Ethical, Legal, Social and Security Issues. The papers show that healthgrid has matured beyond its original projects and is now tackling some difficult problems that seemed intractable up till two years ago.

The principal objective of HealthGrid conference and HealthGrid Association is the exchange and debate of ideas, technologies, solutions and requirements that interest the grid and the life-science communities. This work reflects the anticipated move towards real applications, and discusses accessibility, core technologies and data integration.

This book presents the proceedings of HealthGrid 2010, the latest in the annual open forum for the integration of grid technologies, e science and e health methods and their application in biomedicine and healthcare. Previous conferences have highlighted the need to involve all actors, such as physicians, scientists and technologists, and have served to demonstrate the usefulness of grids to potential application domains, at least at the prototype level. More recently, cloud computing seems set to make an impact as a paradigm more readily acceptable in the practice of healthcare informatics, whilst grids may remain the infrastructure of choice for researchers. Included in this volume are the 19 papers selected after review from 42 original submissions for full presentation at the 2010 conference. Additional papers, presented as posters at the conference, are reproduced here in shorter form. The book has four sections: section one contains four papers under the broad heading of `Socio Economic Aspects and Accessibility', section two: `Future of Grids, Core Technologies & Data Integration', consists of nine papers and section three comprises a further six papers covering `Applications'. Section four includes the `Poster Extended Abstracts'. Of interest to grid middleware and healthgrid application developers, ethicists, security experts and policy makers as well as all users of biomedical and health informatics, this book provides an overview of current trends and developments in this increasingly important field of healthcare.

HealthGrid 2008 is the sixth conference in this series of open forums for the integration of grid technologies and its applications in the biomedical, medical and biological domains to pave the path to an international research area in healthgrids. The main objective of the HealthGrid conference and the HealthGrid Association is the exchange and discussion of ideas, technologies, solutions and requirements that interest the grid and the life-sciences communities to foster the integration of grids into health. Subjects in this publication reflect the diversity of mature practice: Advancing Virtual Communities, offering a glimpse of the kind of communities that are brought together by means of collaboration grids; Public Health Informatics, exploring the diffusion of grid concepts and technologies in health informatics; Translational Bioinformatics, the contact point between medicine, healthcare and genomics; and Knowledge Management and Decision Support, one direction that is confidently expected to grow as the synergy of grids and 'evidence-based practice' in healthcare is exploited.

The contributions of this publication follow mainly five main topics: Medical Imaging on the Grid; Ethical, Legal and Privacy Issues on HealthGrids; Bioinformatics on the Grid; Knowledge Discovery on HealthGrids; and Medical Assessment and HealthGrid Applications. The maturity of the discipline of HealthGrids is clearly reflected on these subjects. There are more contributions related to two main application areas (Medical Imaging and Bioinformatics), confirming the analysis of the HealthGrid White Paper published last year, which outlined them as the two more promising areas for HealthGrids. Along with these two areas, the assessment on the results of HealthGrid applications, also focused by several contributions, denotes also the maturity of HealthGrids. Finally the other two areas (Knowledge Discovery and Ethical, Legal and Privacy Issues) focus on basic technologies which are very relevant for HealthGrids.

"This book provides methodologies and developments of grid technologies applied in different fields of life sciences"--Provided by publisher.

This book approaches the grid computing with a perspective on the latest achievements in the field, providing an insight into the current research trends and advances, and presenting a large range of innovative research papers. The topics covered in this book include resource and data management, grid architectures and development, and grid-enabled applications. New ideas employing heuristic methods from swarm intelligence or genetic algorithm and quantum encryption are considered in order to explain two main aspects of grid computing: resource management and data management. The book addresses also some aspects of grid computing that regard architecture and development, and includes a diverse range of applications for grid computing, including possible human grid computing system, simulation of the fusion reaction, ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning and complex water systems.

"This volume, presented during a symposium in memory of Antonina Starita which was held in Pisa at the Department of Computer Science."--Pref.

The papers presented are refereed and from all over the world. They reflect the breadth and depth of the field of biomedical and health informatics, covering topics such as; health information systems, knowledge and data management, education, standards, consumer health and human factors, emerging technologies, sustainability, organizational and economic issues, genomics, and image and signal processing. As this volume carries such a wide collection, it will be of great interest to anyone engaged in biomedical and health informatics research and application.