Technologies for manipulating medical records in a clinical context have been developed to face daily needs of radiologists and physicians. Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Radiological Information Systems (RIS), and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) are often designed for in-site clinical practice and are not necessarily implementing any data exchange standard nor facilitate manipulation of data on a external network such as a grid. We aim at easing medical image processing on grids in order to enable data and computing resources sharing in the medical imaging community, and facilitating the access to computerized imaging in the clinical environment [1]. An important milestone on this path is to enable transparent and secured data exchanges between the hospital information systems and grid data management systems.

We are developing a prototype for interfacing the standard DICOM servers (Digital Image and Communication in Medicine) encountered in clinics and the grid SRM (Storage Resource Manager standard) interface [2]. The current prototype enables DICOM medical images registration in the grid data management system, and transparent access to images through a DICOM-SRM interface from any SRM-aware grid component. DICOM images are registered as grid files and the associated metadata (transported in DICOM headers) are stored in a relational database accessible through a secured metadata service (AMGA). Our interface is built on top of the gLite middleware stack which offers secured grid data management functionalities.

An important feature associated medical images is the need for preserving patients privacy. In this purpose, images that are sent outside the hospital DICOM servers to grid resources are encrypted. Encryption keys are kept in a secured key store and only authorized users are able to decrypt the data. Similarly, header informations are wiped out of the image headers when they are exported. The nominative metadata remain accessible through the secured metadata manager only. For accessing image files, and the associated keys and metadata, the Medical Data Management users are identified by their grid credentials. All services are controlling user access through Access Control Lists.