PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Isabella Castiglioni TI - FP7-Eu project DECIDE (Diagnostic Enhancement of Confidence by an International Distributed Environment): E-services for the assisted diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases DP - 2011 May 01 TA - Journal of Nuclear Medicine PG - 2034--2034 VI - 52 IP - supplement 1 4099 - http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/52/supplement_1/2034.short 4100 - http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/52/supplement_1/2034.full SO - J Nucl Med2011 May 01; 52 AB - 2034 Objectives Aim of the FP7-Eu project DECIDE (Diagnostic Enhancement of Confidence by an International Distributed Environment) is to implement an international e-infrastructure providing diagnostic e-services to the scientific and clinical community, enhancing the diagnostic confidence of neurodegenerative diseases by medical image-based analysis. DECIDE relies on the Pan-European GEANT backbone and NRENs and offers access to large and distributed (GRID) databases (thousands of image-sets from normal and neurological subjects), and massive computing resources (>1000 CPU core processors and 70 Tbyte) (www.eu-decide.eu). Methods DECIDE has started implementing and integrating services for authorization and secure access to distributed image databases and to computationally demanding image processing algorithms, conforming with ethical regulations of concerned countries. DECIDE is working on integration and packaging of several pipelines as diagnostic services made available to clinicians over a distributed production-quality and highly-performant grid infrastructure leveraging on the high-capacity GEANT and NREN. The LifeRay-based Web portal exhibits several applications integrated within a Single-Sign-On framework coupled with a robot-certificate (easy and secure connection). Results Current applications include voxel-based statistical analysis of functional neurological images. Hospitals with functional imaging systems and without image processing expertise and/or normal subjects data base can work with DECIDE in order to produce reliable diagnosis. The application has been validated on 20 patients (SPECT/PET images). Evaluators agreed on the consistency of the service in providing accurate diagnosis for the considered patients. Conclusions DECIDE provides an innovative international infrastructure by making available to the scientific/clinical community e-services for the medical image-based assisted diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases