Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemA distributed clinical data platform for physiological studies in the brain trauma domain(IEEE Computer Society, 2010)There are many serious and acute physiological conditions about which we have incomplete medical knowledge that can support optimal healthcare intervention. To develop effective treatments a wealth of clinical data is required for collection, analysis and feedback. Such data often does exist but is typically held in a variety of different formats and locations. This paper describes the EU FP7-funded Avert-IT project (www.avert-it.org), which has developed an integrated, real-time physiological data grid infrastructure (HypoNet) to address the specific issue of prediction of hypotensive events in the brain trauma domain and is currently being used as part of a large multi-centre clinical trial. The implementation and application of the HypoNet system is described here.
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ItemSingle sign-on and authorization for dynamic virtual organizations(Springer, 2006)The vision of the Grid is to support the dynamic establishment and subsequent management of virtual organizations (VO). To achieve this presents many challenges for the Grid community with perhaps the greatest one being security. Whilst Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) provide a form of single sign-on through recognition of trusted certification authorities, they have numerous limitations. The Internet2 Shibboleth architecture and protocols provide an enabling technology overcoming some of the issues with PKIs however Shibboleth too suffers from various limitations that make its application for dynamic VO establishment and management difficult. In this paper we explore the limitations of PKIs and Shibboleth and present an infrastructure that incorporates single sign-on with advanced authorization of federated security infrastructures and yet is seamless and targeted to the needs of end users. We explore this infrastructure through an educational case study at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
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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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ItemTrust realisation in collaborative clinical trials systems(British Computer Society, 2007)
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ItemFormalising dynamic trust negotiations in decentralised collaborative e-health systems(IEEE Computer Society, 2007)Access control in decentralised collaborative systems present huge challenges especially where many autonomous entities including organizations, humans, software agents from different security domains seek to access and share resources in a secure and controlled way. Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is one approach that has been proposed for trust discovery and realisation, which enables entities viz. Strangers to access resources across autonomous boundaries through iterative exchange of credentials. Various negotiation strategies have been proposed to protect credential disclosure during trust negotiations. However in some domains such as e-health, not all entities are willing to negotiate credentials or disclose access policies directly to strangers regardless of negotiation strategies and instead prefer to negotiate and disclose sensitive information only to strangers within what we refer to as a circle of trust. In this paper, we introduce a formal model to describe how locally trusted intermediary parties can provide multiple negotiation and delegations hops to protect credentials and access policies. We propose a dynamic trust negotiations (DTN) model that not only protects sensitive information from disclosure but also reduces semantic issues that exist with credentials in decentralized systems. This work is currently being explored and implemented within the e-health domain: specifically in the MRC-funded Virtual Organisation for Trials of Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project.
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ItemA clinical grid infrastructure supporting adverse hypotensive event prediction(IEEE Computer Society, 2009)The condition of hypotension - where a person's arterial blood pressure drops to an abnormally low level - is a common and potentially fatal occurrence in patients under intensive care. As medical interventions to treat such events are typically reactive and often aggressive, there would be great benefit in having a prediction system that can warn health-care professionals of an impending event and thereby allow them to provide non-invasive, preventative treatments. This paper describes the progress of the EU FP7 funded Avert-IT project, which is developing just such a system using Bayesian neural network learning technology based upon an integrated, real-time data grid infrastructure, which draws together heterogeneous data-sets from six clinical centres across Europe.
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ItemSupporting grid-based clinical trials in Scotland(Sage, 2008)A computational infrastructure to underpin complex clinical trials and medical population studies is highly desirable. This should allow access to a range of distributed clinical data sets; support the effi cient processing and analysis of the data obtained; have security at its heart; and ensure that authorized individuals are able to see privileged data and no more. Each clinical trial has its own requirements on data sets and how they are used; hence a reusable and fl exible framework offers many advantages. The MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) is a collaborative project involving several UK universities specifi cally to explore this space. This article presents the experiences of developing the Scottish component of this nationwide infrastructure, by the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) based at the University of Glasgow, and the issues inherent in accessing and using the clinical data sets in a fl exible, dynamic and secure manner.