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Management of clinical workflows in Cancer Research

The EPSRC and MRC funded CancerGrid project will deliver modular, distributed software solutions for the key problems of clinical cancer informatics: clinical trial patient entry, randomisation and follow-up; storage and analysis of complex datasets; linking trial and epidemiology data with profiling information. It will facilitate trials management, and future collaboration across international boundaries. CancerGrid has adopted a .NET-based web-services approach and these web services need to be combined in a flexible manner and these combinations then form new web services themselves. In 2005, CancerGrid has adopted BPEL as their workflow language and the ActiveBPEL engine contained in the OMII-BPEL environment for modelling, enacting and monitoring a large number of clinical workflows for cancer research. CancerGrid are developing web services to handle patient records in cancer research.

The figure below shows an early CancerGrid workflow that combines two web services. The first service validates whether the details provided about a patient are complete and valid and whether the patient is eligible to participate in a trial. If this is the case the workflow then invokes a service that determines the most appropriate treatment type for the service. The figure below is a print-out of the BPEL representation that was developed with the Eclipse-based BPEL Designer that UCL develop jointly with Oracle, IBM and JBoss and that is integrated into the OMII-BPEL environment. The workflow was determined, validated and deployed into the ActiveBPEL run-time environment within 15 minutes. As an Eclipse-environment, BPEL Designer provides support for version and configuration management of workflows, validation of workflows prior to deployment, support to edit, browse and query service interface definitions in WSDL and type definitions in XML Schema and many other useful features.

Following deployment of a BPEL process, BPEL Designer can generate a Web Service Explorer that serves as a web-based user interface and allows users to invoke the web service implemented by the BPEL process. This is achieved by a single BPEL Designer command. The figure below shows the Web Service Explorer for the clinical workflow shown above.