Vascular diseases are a major medical problem, particularly in the developed countries and are of major concern in Europe. Treatment often involves surgery. Two common procedures are the placement of a bypass to lead the blood around clogged (stenosed) arteries and the placement of so-called stents that provide support to weakened (aneurysmal) arteries. A surgeon plans these interventions on the basis of 3D images obtained from MRI or CT scans. Both stents and bypasses aim to improve blood flow and for both procedures there are often various alternatives. Besides considerations such as accessibility, the attainable improvement in blood flow will determine which alternative is best for a particular patient.

Information systems that support vascular surgeons in their preoperative decision making for certain interventions in the vascular system can benefit from advanced simulation and visualisation tools. Such tools require access to vast computational resources.

Grid computing provides a modern way of addressing problems of this kind, by linking together hundreds or even thousands of geographically distributed computers to harness their total processing potential.

A prototype system for pretreatment planning in vascular interventional and surgical procedures is included as an application of Grid computing in the CrossGrid project.  This prototype relies upon the CrossGrid infrastructure for its operation, advancing medical technology on a European scale.