Architecting and Building the Future of Healthcare Informatics: Cloud, Containers, Big Data and CHIPS

New trends in software engineering are reshaping the computing landscape – computation is increasingly portable, storage is increasingly elastic, and data accessibility is increasingly “always on” and “always available” to an exponentially increasing variety of applications and devices. While the effects of these trends in the larger “compute-verse” are profound, this paper will discuss and consider how these trends are affecting specifically healthcare informatics. Indeed, end users will experience this trend in applications that are web-centric and mobile-friendly. Such apps will be increasingly used as gateways to powerful backend services (such as analytics and deep learning), while offering local client-side specialization (rich, immersive visual-izations and collaborations). The paper offers some perspectives and presents some unmet needs in medical informatics and seeks to provide a viewpoint into how the “next wave” of computing might present itself. In particular the paper presents a web-based medical image data and information management software platform called CHIPS (Cloud Healthcare Image Processing Service). This cloud-based service uniquely provides an end-to-end service that can connect data from deep within a Hospital securely to the cloud and allow for powerful collaboration – both on medical image data but also on image processing pipelines, allow for complex processing and enable computational research, and provide a vision of decentralized, large-scale data analysis that can fuel Big Data on medical bioinformatics.

@article{Pienaar2018,
  title     = {Architecting and Building the Future of Healthcare Informatics: Cloud, Containers, Big Data and CHIPS},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {9},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2018},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Rudolph Pienaar and Ata Truk and Jorge Bernal and Nicolas Rannou},
  doi       = {10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.090133},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.090133}
}