Boston Children’s Hospital is ramping down the time it takes to process medical images by teaming up with Red Hat Inc. to deploy the ChRIS Research Integration Service on the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC).

Consisting of a variety of open-source Red Hat technologies, the web-based medical image platform offers providers a distributed user interface that opens up collaboration in real time between clinicians and radiologists worldwide.

“Something that might have taken hours or days can now be executed in minutes or seconds, bringing valuable data back to the clinical front line in a time frame relevant to individual patient care,” P. Ellen Grant, director of the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, told HCB News. “Further, the ChRIS platform, combined with an open cloud like the MOC, creates the possibility of establishing secure cost-effective storage and computing for medical data that is run by a consortium of hospitals and institutions at a fraction of the cost required to host in each hospital or use in today's public clouds.”

Hour-long waiting times can often expand the likelihood of serious injury or death in medically-critical situations. Faster image processing and sharing of critical data in real time can deter the chance of these outcomes.

Using ChRIS, Boston Children’s Hospital plans to create a flexible, open, hybrid cloud architecture offering agility, scale and standardization in the deployment of imaging applications, to reduce challenges between app developers and users who require quick access to these apps.

The platform comprises Red Hat Enterprise Linux, enabling scalable, secure and supported Linux distribution as well as the acceleration of GPUs running on MOC.

The use of Linux containers as well as Kubernetes at the core of ChRIS will be used to build, deploy and scale applications in imaging, analytics and diagnosis with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

OpenShift will offer flexibility to use cloud-native application frameworks and run times across MOC, running on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, an agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service that is the basis for MOC’s scalable compute nodules and providing GPU acceleration.

The solution also joins together Red Hat CloudForms’ hybrid cloud management capabilities and Red Hat Ansible Automation’s broad and agent-less IT automation engine for better management of the ChRIS solution, simplified service and policy management, and additional automation to keep routine tasks running smoothly.

In addition, ChRIS offers Red Hat Ceph Storage, an open, scalable storage solution for modern workloads to quicken and scale-up MOC’s redundant cloud storage.

The solution will be deployed on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform with app containers prepackaged with all of the required libraries, enabling quick app installations in an orchestrated manner within the platform. Coding assistance and guidance in the development of ChRIS will be provided by RedHat.

Grant says once a fully developed business model for supporting end users is in place, ChRIS will be expanded throughout the Boston area and eventually to institutions across the country and abroad, with skills to aid their own end-users and further enhance the platform’s performance.

“Nationally, we have extensive connections to several institutions and groups that are natural early partners, including Texas Children's and Cincinnati Children's,” she said. “After a positive reception at Red Hat summit, our team has been approached by interested parties in Canada, the U.K., Japan, and Australia that may be great targets for early international partnerships. As we raise the revenue to support them, we hope to include institutions in developing countries such as Malaysia, China, and South Africa, for which ChRIS will address critical limitations in regional resources.”

She further notes that such extensions could lead to the establishment of “cross-institutional sharing of data in the cloud,” enabling many possible scenarios for enhancing diagnosis and treatment commencements.

“This breaking of silos will further enable much broader information to be incorporated into clinical care. We can envision a future, for example, where we have a large, secure repository of medical data and can then submit a patient's images and electronic health care record to rapidly search for similar patients, discovering which approach is the most successful. Such a scenario is only one of many that would increase the speed of diagnosis and initiation of the best treatment.”