An XML based middleware for ECG format conversion

Abstract

With the rapid development of information and communication technologies, various e-health solutions have been proposed. The digitized medical images as well as the mono-dimension medical signals are two major forms of medical information that are stored and manipulated within an electronic medical environment. Though a variety of industrial and international standards such as DICOM and HL7 have been proposed, many proprietary formats are still pervasively used by many Hospital Information System (HIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) vendors. Those proprietary formats are the big hurdle to form a nationwide or even worldwide e-health network. Thus there is an imperative need to solve the medical data integration problem. Moreover, many small clinics, many hospitals in developing countries and some regional hospitals in developed countries, which have limited budget, have been shunned from embracing the latest medical information technologies due to their high costs. In this paper, we propose an XML based middleware which acts as a translation engine to seamlessly integrate clinical ECG data from a variety of proprietary data formats. Furthermore, this ECG translation engine is designed in a way that it can be integrated into an existing PACS to provide a low cost medical information integration and storage solution.

Usage of Standards to Integration of Hospital Information Systems

“…According to the results of this study, XML, HL7 and DICOM are the most common data interchange standards of HISs. These findings of the current study are consistent with those of Xuchen Li et al who used an XML based middleware to integrate clinical data and used HL7 v2.3.1 as the communication interface of the middleware [10]. The results are consistent with Heitmann et al who used XML for standardization of the communication between hospital information systems and physician offices [21].…”

ECG Standards and Formats for Interoperability between mHealth and Healthcare Information Systems: A Scoping Review

“…Moreover, XML offers simple, scalable, highly interoperable, and highly humanreadable solutions, as well as seamless integration with machines, protocols, and application architectures [12,27,77].…”

“…There are several works that propose to use the XML format to perform format converters, for example, in [77] the authors present an XML project, an XML-based middleware is designed to convert a variety of ECG formats into HL7 message formats and integrate them with an existing Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). It can be considered more as a storage facility than as a true processing environment.…”