pro-AD website: MRI analysis for prodromal Alzheimer’s assessment

Recently I participated in the pro-AD’s website development.

pro-AD is a website created at DIFI, the University of Genoa’s Department of Physics, to help medics automagically analyse MRI images for the prodromal Alzheimer's disease assessment.

Registered medics can easily submit DICOM or NII files through the website to their private local folder via the java applet JUploader or the PHP uploader which is shown automatically when no java plugin is detected on the user's browser. They can then modify the information associated with those images: age, gender and an optional unique ID - no personal data about the patients is stored anywhere anytime during the process.

Easy access for the medic's personal profile is provided through a dedicated page; if a valid e-mail address is provided, it is possible to enable e-mail notifications about processing results.

When one or more files are selected for processing, the server enqueues them in a multithreaded pipeline and starts the analysis. At the end, a single number which describes the patient's likelihood of being affected in the near future by the disease is returned for each file sent to processing. If the file processed was of really bad quality or was not a valid file, the process fails and an error is shown instead of the result.

All results are stored for easy future access and can be viewed and exported in XLS format from a dedicated page. If a file is sent to processing more times, only the latest result is stored.