The RITA Project technical details

Paper: 345
Session: D (poster)
Presenter: Risso, Pietro, INFN, Genova
Keywords: networking, data bases, security, WWW applications, Java


The RITA Project technical details

M. Ferraris(1-2), P. Risso(1-2) and S. Squarcia(2)

(1) TERA - Fondazione per Adroterapia Oncologica, Via Puccini 11, 28100 Novara
(2) Dipartimento di Fisica e Sezione INFN, Via Dodecaneso 33, 16146 Genova

The RITA (Rete Italiana Trattamenti Adroterapici) approach is presented
underlining the technical aspect of the intranet connections, the distributed
data base developments and the World Wide Web client/server architecture.
The RITA client-server system installation inside a medical facility must be
done in function of the goal after an accurate environment evaluation.

In a pre-existing machine the first problem that must be considered is the
computation of the load caused by the use of the RITA system, having in mind
the normal job which that machine is dedicated to. The whole system, formed
by one or two http servers and one mSQL server, is normally waiting for an
external call and in this state no valuable portion of CPU and bus time is
used. When the right call cames, the http server, which is the real task
manager of RITA, organizes the operations which must be done by all the
components of the system to answer the request. This means that only in this
case some resources of the host machine are used.

More advantages and services for the medical LAN can be obtained designing and
configuring a computer for hosting the client-server System RITA. Normally
the computers inside a medical facility cannot access some typical services
like e-mail and USENET. A machine dedicated to RITA could be therefore
organized to act as a little internet server for the LAN.

The RITA machine must be able to access the LAN and the internet at the same
time; for this reason a great care on the security has been taken during the
designing phase. A firewall has been realized at high level using proxy servers
for different protocols and at low level through IP routing rules directly
inside the operating system.

The system is designed to interact with the users in the easiest way from
their point of view. The choice of an hypertext architecture was done to
minimize the number of operations the user has to do to use the interface to
the system. For the same reason Java was chosen as the ideal language to
develop the active part of the interface at the client side.

In RITA the first example of a tool realized in Java is the editor of the
schematic images which are normally included inside a clinical folder. With
this the user can choose the image corresponding to the desired part of the
human body and then highlight a zone of interest drawing on it a geometric
shape.