Codian has enabled all parties involved in the CancerGrid telemedicine project to collaborate effectively at long distances, sharing research and ideas
One in four people will be diagnosed with a type of cancer during their lifetime and the CancerGrid project has been devised to support researchers whose aim is to help prevent, diagnose and find a cure for this disease.
It is a consortium of specialists in oncology and software engineering drawn from five leading UK universities, including Cambridge, Oxford and Birmingham universities, University College London and Queens' University Belfast.
The aim of CancerGrid is to deliver a services-based grid infrastructure for cancer clinical trials.
The universities will develop software solutions to tackle key issues around the collation and detailed analysis of complicated patient data from trials carried out around the country.
In particular, CancerGrid will focus on clinical patient entry details and linking trial and epidemiology data with in-depth profiling information.
The challenge.
With hundreds of patients being recruited for each trial around the UK, the CancerGrid's ultimate aim is to radically improve methods of research.
However, for this to happen, it must have the tools to communicate on a daily basis with patients and clinicians at all five universities, analysing patient details and the associated pathology information.
Cambridge University eScience Centre was tasked with developing new generic grid-based tools for data handling and communication across wide area networks.
It chose Codian to provide the powerful video-conferencing (VC) infrastructure that would enable consortium partners to collaborate effectively.
The eScience Centre chose two of Codian's infrastructure products, the MCU 4200 series and IP VCR 2200 series.
The MCU 4200 is a powerful VC bridge, which offers a video conferencing experience with continuous presence and no loss of image or sound quality regardless of the number of users involved on a call, or the bandwidth available on the network.
In addition, Codian's IP VCR 2200 series is the industry's first digital video recorder and streaming server specifically designed for video conferencing.
It is an IP-based system that enables users to preserve valuable video content for future viewing.
Furthermore, it records, streams live or plays back on demand to a PC or any video conferencing endpoint.
According to Kate Caldwell, telemedicine developer at the Cambridge eScience Centre, "We needed broader capabilities and flexibility for the CancerGrid project and Codian provided the answer.
"Codian's demonstrations of crystal clear video images with superior audio quality impressed us.
"It has enabled us to collaborate across universities, joining group discussions to speed research across the country.
"One of the most important issues for us was protecting our investment.
"Codian's technology is endpoint agnostic, so it works with all the existing VC products that we have already installed.
"This meant that we didn't have to spend thousands of pounds upgrading all of our current equipment.
"It also means that we can easily upgrade the solution as the CancerGrid expands and evolves.
"We also liked the user experience.
"It is highly intuitive and easy to use, so we knew right away we would be comfortable working with it.
"Each participant is in control of the conference and can personalise according to their own needs, which is a real benefit for us"..
As well as multi-site video conferencing, Codian has also delivered streaming of video and content, such as presentations, to remote participants both live and as video-on-demand.
Kate Caldwell added: "Codian's firewall option also made our lives so much easier with regard to deployment: I simply give users one dial-in IP address and the local network is protected, so our IT team is satisfied we are not compromising security.
"This alone saved us incredible time when we were deploying the solution."
