Pradeeban Kathiravelu

Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Puneet Sharma, Ashish Sharma et al.

Executing machine learning (ML) pipelines in real-time on radiology images is hard due to the limited computing resources in clinical environments and the lack of efficient data transfer capabilities to run them on research clusters. We propose Niffler, an integrated framework that enables the execution of ML pipelines at research clusters by efficiently querying and retrieving radiology images from the Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) of the hospitals. Niffler uses the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) protocol to fetch and store imaging data and provides metadata extraction capabilities and Application programming interfaces (APIs) to apply filters on the images. Niffler further enables the sharing of the outcomes from the ML pipelines in a de-identified manner. Niffler has been running stable for more than 19 months and has supported several research projects at the department. In this paper, we present its architecture and three of its use cases: an inferior vena cava (IVC) filter detection from the images in real-time, identification of scanner utilization, and scanner clock calibration. Evaluations on the Niffler prototype highlight its feasibility and efficiency in facilitating the ML pipelines on the images and metadata in real-time and retrospectively.

Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Yusuf Nadir Saghar, Tushar Aggarwal et al.

The diversity of data management systems affords developers the luxury of building systems with heterogeneous systems that address needs that are unique to the data. It allows one to mix-n-match systems that can store, query, update, and process data, based on specific use cases. However, this heterogeneity brings with it the burden of developing custom interfaces for each data management system. Developers are required to build high-performance APIs for data access while adopting best-practices governing security, data privacy, and access control. These include user authentication, data authorization, role-based access control, and audit mechanisms to avoid compromising the security standards mandated by data providers. In this paper, we present Bindaas, a secure, extensible big data middleware that offers uniform access to diverse data sources. By providing a standard RESTful web service interface to the data sources, Bindaas exposes query, update, store, and delete functionality of the data sources as data service APIs, while providing turn-key support for standard operations involving security, access control, and audit-trails. Bindaas consists of optional features, such as query and response modifiers as well as plugins that implement composable and reusable data operations on the data. The research community has deployed Bindaas in various production environments in healthcare. Our evaluations highlight the efficiency of Bindaas in serving concurrent requests to data source instances. We further observe that the overheads caused by Bindaas on the data sources are negligible.

Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Tihana Galinac Grbac, Luís Veiga

Service composition is an aggregate of services often leveraged to automate the enterprise business processes. While Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been a forefront of service composition, services can be realized as efficient distributed and parallel constructs such as MapReduce, which are not typically exploited in service composition. With the advent of Software\-Defined Networking (SDN), global view and control of the entire network is made available to the networking controller, which can further be leveraged in application level. This paper presents FIRM, an approach for Software-Defined Service Composition by leveraging SDN and MapReduce. FIRM comprises Find, Invoke, Return, and Manage, as the core procedures in achieving a QoS-Aware Service Composition.