Luigi Lo Iacono

Strategies for health data exchange for secondary, cross-institutional clinical research

Secondary use of health data has a vital role in improving and advancing medical knowledge. While digital health records offer scope for facilitating the flow of data to secondary uses, it remains essential that steps are taken to respect wishes of the patient regarding secondary usage, and to ensure the privacy of the patient during secondary use scenarios. Consent, together with depersonalisation and its related concepts of anonymisation, pseudonymisation, and data minimisation are key methods used to provide this protection. This paper gives an overview of technical, practical, legal, and ethical aspects of secondary data use and discusses their implementation in the multi-institutional @neurIST research project.

@neurIST: Infrastructure for Advanced Disease Management Through Integration of Heterogeneous Data, Computing, and Complex Processing Services

The increasing volume of data describing human disease processes and the growing complexity of understanding, managing, and sharing such data presents a huge challenge for clinicians and medical researchers. This paper presents the @neurIST system, which provides an infrastructure for biomedical research while aiding clinical care, by bringing together heterogeneous data and complex processing and computing services. Although @neurIST targets the investigation and treatment of cerebral aneurysms, the systems architecture is generic enough that it could be adapted to the treatment of other diseases. Innovations in @neurIST include confining the patient data pertaining to aneurysms inside a single environment that offers clinicians the tools to analyze and interpret patient data and make use of knowledge-based guidance in planning their treatment. Medical researchers gain access to a critical mass of aneurysm related data due to the systems ability to federate distributed information sources. A semantically mediated grid infrastructure ensures that both clinicians and researchers are able to seamlessly access and work on data that is distributed across multiple sites in a secure way in addition to providing computing resources on demand for performing computationally intensive simulations for treatment planning and research.

@neurIST - Towards a System Architecture for Advanced Disease Management through Integration of Heterogeneous Data, Computing, and Complex Processing Services

This paper presents the system architecture of the @neurIST project, which aims at supporting the research and treatment of cerebral aneurysms by bringing together heterogeneous data, computing and complex processing services. The architecture is generic enough to adapt it to the treatment of other diseases beyond cerebral aneurysms. The paper describes the generic requirements of the system and presents the architecture, applications and middleware technologies used to realise the system and highlights the innovations in @neurIST.

Secure Browser-Based Access to Web Services

Access to Web Services via Web front-ends provides all the advantages related to browser-based thin clients and is therefore a common setting. However, providing end-to-end security between Web browsers and Web Services is currently not feasible due to the inadequate support for Web Service Security in Web browsers. Moreover, the current SOAP APIs offered by the major browsers are incompatible with one another making the task of providing a uniform solution to address this problem difficult. This paper describes a method by which the Web Service communication between a Web browser and a Web Service is protected end-to-end using Web Service Security thereby providing a means to overcome this limitation.

Security in opensocial-instrumented social networking services

Securing social networking services is challenging and becomes even more complex when third-party applications are able to access user data. Still, adequate security and privacy solutions are imperative in order to build and maintain trust in such extensible social platforms. This paper discusses security issues in the context of OpenSocial-instrumented social networking services. It shows that the OpenSocial specification is far from being comprehensive in respect to security. Resulting weaknesses and shortcomings are emphasized and discussed. Finally, the paper attempts to fill these gaps by proposing extensions to the OpenSocial specification and recommendations for social networks that implement OpenSocial.