Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemE-Infrastructures for clinical epidemiological studies across Scotland(International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), 2008)As the proliferation of digital data about individuals increases the opportunities for leveraging this information to benefit society become correspondingly greater. This is especially true in the domain of e-Health where a large number of disparate clinical data resources exist around the world, often housed in individual systems, but with great potential to advance medical and health-care provision if harnessed together and linked with other data resources. In this paper we present a variety of projects that federate such health and other data through re-usable and adaptable e-Infrastructures targeted to the needs of the Scottish and wider e-Research communities. At the heart of all these systems and to counter societies natural wariness of such systems and their use of their personal information are fine grained and adaptable security systems which restrict and enforce access to data to authorised individuals. In this paper we outline these e- Infrastructure architectures, their associated security models and how we are applying them to support epidemiological studies.
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ItemGrid infrastructures for secure access to and use of bioinformatics data: experiences from the BRIDGES project(IEEE Computer Society, 2006)The BRIDGES project was funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to address the needs of cardiovascular research scientists investigating the genetic causes of hypertension as part of the Wellcome Trust funded (£4.34M) cardiovascular functional genomics (CFG) project. Security was at the heart of the BRIDGES project and an advanced data and compute grid infrastructure incorporating latest grid authorisation technologies was developed and delivered to the scientists. We outline these grid infrastructures and describe the perceived security requirements at the project start including data classifications and how these evolved throughout the lifetime of the project. The uptake and adoption of the project results are also presented along with the challenges that must be overcome to support the secure exchange of life science data sets. We also present how we will use the BRIDGES experiences in future projects at the National e-Science Centre.
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ItemTechnical challenges in leveraging distributed clinical data(IASTED, 2008-12-01)
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ItemTowards decentralised security policies for e-health collaborations(IEEE, 2008-11-17)
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ItemAdvanced security infrastructures for grid education( 2006)This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain.
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ItemBlind data aggregation from distributed, protected sources(National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow, 2008)Successful e-health research depends on access to and usage of a wide range of clinical, biomedical, social, geo-spatial, environmental and other data sets. In large scale, multi-centre clinical studies crossing geographical and organizational divides, the need to access, link and aggregate data securely is essential. Whilst the e-Science community have come up with a wide variety of technologies that support authentication and authorization, past experiences from working with organizations such as the National Health Service (NHS) in projects such as the MRC funded Virtual Organizations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project, have shown that irrespective of the technological advances and capabilities offered by the e-Science community, data providers themselves are typically unwilling to provide direct access to their data sets, i.e. through penetration of the NHS firewall for example from HE/FE. There are many reasons for this which we outline in this paper, both pragmatic and technological. Ultimately, data providers and the key stakeholders in this space are acutely aware of confidentiality and ethics concerns on data access and usage. They will only release their data provided it can be ensured that it is not possible to link it with other data sets that can result in potential violations of patient confidentiality for example through statistical disclosure. This paper presents a novel approach and its implementation that directly addresses these issues, providing a so-called Virtual Anonymisation Grid for Unified Access to Remote Clinical Data (Vanguard). Key features of Vanguard are its support for pull models of interaction with data providers such as the NHS, who do not necessarily have to open up their firewalls and thereby open themselves up to risks of attack; support of secure, anonymous data aggregation; support for novel ways in which data release to users undertaking research allows them to obtain and use data in a secure, disclosure free environment where third parties cannot access/use any released data. We demonstrate this through case studies applying the Vanguard system to clinical scenarios and systems working with the NHS in Scotland.
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ItemSecure, reliable and dynamic access to distributed clinical data( 2006)An abundance of statistical and scientific data exists in the area of clinical and epidemiological studies. Much of this data is distributed across regional, national and international boundaries with different policies on access and usage, and a multitude of different schemata for the data often complicated by the variety of supporting clinical coding schemes. This prevents the wide scale collation and analysis of such data as is often needed to infer clinical outcomes and to determine the often moderate effect of drugs. Through grid technologies it is possible to overcome the barriers introduced by distribution of heterogeneous data and services. However reliability, dynamicity and fine-grained security are essential in this domain, and are not typically offered by current grids. The MRC funded VOTES project (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) has implemented a prototype infrastructure specifically designed to meet these challenges. This paper describes this on-going implementation effort and the lessons learned in building grid frameworks for and within a clinical environment.
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ItemSupporting security-oriented, inter-disciplinary research: crossing the social, clinical and geospatial domains(UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, 2008)
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ItemSecurity-oriented portals for the life sciences(Oxford University Press, 2009)Motivation: The life sciences are broad in scope and cover multi- and inter-disciplinary domains as well as the biological domain. These domains can for example involve researchers from the clinical, social, geo-spatial and computer sciences amongst others, e.g. in understanding genetic variations across a population as might be undertaken through a genome-wide association study. Given, this it is essential that portals for these communities are targeted to the individual expertise of the particular domain scientists. Thus tools available to a bioinformatician through a portal might well be meaningless to a social scientist and vice versa. Furthermore certain domains demand that fine-grained access control on data is supported. In this paper we outline how a portfolio of life science related projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow have benefited from security-oriented portals focused upon ease of access, configuration and usage, where data providers are assumed to be autonomous and able to make their own local fine-grained access control decisions. We describe the basic technologies that underlie these solutions and outline specific case studies in their application in the areas of depression, self-harm and suicide, and in the area of paediatric endocrinology focusing in particular on rare diseases associated with sex development.
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ItemTrust realisation in collaborative clinical trials systems(British Computer Society, 2007)