SOA: The LEGO® Approach
Emory Develops Novel Imaging Grid Services
To understand the bioinformatics work underway at Emory University, it might be helpful to think back to childhood, when many of us played with LEGO® blocks. Led by Joel Saltz, M.D., Ph.D., the Emory team is developing caGrid-compatible services that will enhance the development of biomedical informatics tools today and into the future. Just like the colorful blocks from our youth, these services can be easily combined to build something bigger than the sum of its parts. But instead of castles and monuments, this team is building a more efficient research enterprise.
As Director of the Center for Comprehensive Informatics at Emory University, Dr. Saltz is leading efforts to create new services, or interoperable snippets of code that enable key research functions. These services leverage the power of a service oriented architecture (SOA), and offer many of the same benefits of Lego blocks – namely, interoperability, flexibility and reusability. In the long run, using SOA can lead to faster, higher quality software development, at reduced cost.
SOA in Imaging and Pathology
The Emory team is on the leading edge of developing the building blocks or services needed to address unmet research needs in imaging and pathology. In the area of digital pathology, the group is developing tools (caMicroscope) and associated services for capturing and storing high resolution pathology images so they can be annotated, shared and viewed at resolutions comparable with conventional microscopy. Given that a single slide image can easily be several gigapixels in size, the task is no small undertaking.
"We wanted to offer researchers the ability to characterize and classify cellular nuclei to help construct a hierarchy of information that brings us closer to a meaningful interpretation of the images," explains Tony Pan, senior systems research architect at Emory University. "Our model allows for annotation that deals with small and numerous entities and we're also moving toward an automated analysis of whole gigapixel slides."
The Emory team also developed a "Virtual PACS" (Picture Archiving and Communications Systems) capability that provides secure, standards-based access to remote radiology data. The protocols developed interact with secure and non-secure data sources, with the potential to expose new data imaging sources previously unavailable to researchers. This interoperable building block gives researchers access to diverse image collections, and with it the benefits of larger sample populations.
Just as Legoland couldn't be built without a guiding architecture, these services would be isolated as single structures were it not for caGrid guiding their development and organization. By combining reusable services, data interoperability, and an organizing framework, the team at Emory will empower a new approach to rapid, efficient software development that will help provide researchers with the right tool at the right time, removing obstacles and opening up new possibilities for discovery.
Benefits of a Services-Oriented Approach
- Interoperability: Remember, with Legos, all the blocks have standard bumps, and therefore any Lego block will fit into any other Lego block. Similarly, standards-based interfaces form the foundation for service interoperability and allow services to work together for improved efficiencies.
- Flexibility: Legos are meant to be used together to form any number of structures. One Lego is no fun, and not very functional—the point is to use Legos to build something larger and more complex. In this way, SOA uses a combination of blocks, or services, to build applications that can power business processes.
- Reusability: Just like Lego blocks, services can be used and reused in many ways. But to fully appreciate how useful SOA can be, think about the colors of blocks. If all the red blocks to represent customer information services, for example, these red blocks can be used in many different structures, just as it is possible to compose customer information services into many business processes. In other words, organizations can easily reuse their existing assets rather than buying a whole new bag of blocks with each construction.
