Red Hat Collaborates with the Massachusetts Open Cloud and Leading Children’s Hospital to Help Shape the Future of Medical Image Processing

The ChRIS Research Integration Service will reduce the time it takes to analyze medical images and increase cross-hospital collaboration for swifter crucial decisions

SAN FRANCISCO - RED HAT SUMMIT 2018 -

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital to deploy the ChRIS Research Integration Service, a web-based medical image platform developed using Red Hat technologies, on the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC). The platform provides a distributed user interface that is designed to enable real-time collaboration between clinicians and radiologists around the world.

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With Red Hat’s technology, we are able to create an open, scalable and shareable platform capable of reducing the time it takes to analyze key images from hours to minutes.

Dr. Ellen Grant

Director of Fetal and Neonatal Neuorimaging Research, Boston Children's Hospital and Professor of Radiology and Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School

In medically-critical scenarios, every minute counts and the cost of waiting hours for medical images to be scanned, shared, and analyzed can mean the difference between a patient’s life or death. Faster image processing and the ability to share critical data through real-time collaboration can lead to quicker and more accurate diagnoses, helping to improve patient outcomes.

With the goal of providing a central collaboration platform that is open to the global medical imaging community, Boston Children’s Hospital built ChRIS using a variety of Red Hat’s open source technologies that allow for a flexible, open hybrid cloud architecture that is designed for agility and scale. These include:

  • Red Hat Enterpise Linux, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, provides a scalable, more secure, and supported Linux distribution, and is being used to accelerate the Graphics Processing Units (GPU) running on MOC.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat’s Kubernetes container application platform, is being used as part of the solution for application lifecycle management, making it easy to build, deploy and scale applications for imaging, analytics and diagnosis using Linux containers and Kubernetes at the core of ChRIS. Running on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, OpenShift also allows for the flexibility to use cloud-native application frameworks and runtimes across the MOC.    
  • Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat’s agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), is the foundation for MOC’s scalable compute nodes. The platform also helps provide GPU acceleration while adhering to OpenStack’s built-in security standards.
  • Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Ansible Automation fuel a combined cloud management and automation approach. CloudForms provides a hybrid cloud management platform while Ansible offers a broad, agentless IT automation engine - together, the technologies help Boston Children’s Hospital better manage the ChRIS solution, simplifying service and policy management and adding automation to keep routine tasks moving smoothly.
  • Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat’s open, scalable storage solution for modern workloads, helps MOC provide fast, redundant cloud storage at scale.

ChRIS provides a standardized way of deploying imaging applications, which reduces the barrier that currently exists between developers of those apps and users who need quick access to them. Because ChRIS runs on Red Hat OpenShift deployed on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, app containers built for ChRIS come prepackaged with all of the required libraries, enabling the user to quickly install an app and then use it in an orchestrated way within the platform.

Red Hat is also providing coding help and guidance for the development of the ChRIS platform.

The MOC project brings together talent and technologies from various academic, government, non-profit, and industry organizations to collaboratively create an open, production-grade public cloud suitable for cutting-edge research and development. Through its ongoing work with the group, Red Hat is able to support the growth of the ChRIS platform as it scales to the cloud and evolves into a robust, multidisciplinary scientific research platform that the MOC and Boston Children’s Hospital plan to make available to other hospitals in Boston and beyond.

Red Hat shares MOC and Boston Children’s Hospital’s mission of finding and creating the best solutions to real problems and sharing them with the broader community for all to use. Red Hat’s culture and technology have proven to be a natural fit for the project, and Red Hat is committed to helping ChRIS expand while also helping MOC cement its status as one of the leading cloud computing choices for research in the Northeastern U.S. With a foundation built on open technology, the Boston Children’s Hospital and MOC teams are committed to keeping the open data sets created by ChRIS open to all to further broaden innovation in children’s healthcare.

P. Ellen Grant, M.D., Director of the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center, Director of Fetal and Neonatal Neuroimaging Research, Professor of Pediatrics and Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital Endowed Chair in Neonatology, Boston Children’s Hospital
“The collaboration with Red Hat came very naturally. We are both seen as leaders in our respective sectors and have a shared goal of creating open technology solutions to aid doctors in making potentially life-saving decisions. With Red Hat’s technology, we are able to create an open, scalable and shareable platform capable of reducing the time it takes to analyze key images from hours to minutes.”

Chris Wright, vice president and chief technology officer, Red Hat
“When it comes to breakthroughs in healthcare technology, it is not enough to have an open platform, but also one that is capable of hosting and managing huge data sets while enabling researchers to run compute-intensive workloads. Collaborating with Boston University and the Massachusetts Open Cloud on ChRIS was an excellent match for Red Hat, as this model shows how collaboration in cloud computing can fuel innovation beyond just traditional enterprise IT. Open innovation can quickly change the face of modern medicine, and Red Hat is proud to be a part of this effort.”

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