<title>Intelligent distributed medical image management</title>

Abstract

The rapid advancements in high performance global communication have accelerated cooperative image-based medical services to a new frontier. Traditional image-based medical services such as radiology and diagnostic consultation can now fully utilize multimedia technologies in order to provide novel services, including remote cooperative medical triage, distributed virtual simulation of operations, as well as cross-country collaborative medical research and training.Fast (efficient) and easy (flexible) retrieval of relevant images remains a critical requirement for the provision of remote medical services. This paper describes the database system requirements, identifies technological building blocks for meeting the requirements, and presents a system architecture for our target image database system, MISSION-DBS, which has been designed to fulfill the goals of Project MISSION (Medical Imaging Support via Satellite Integrated Optical Network) -an experimental high performance gigabit satellite conimunication network with access to remote supercomputing power, medical image databases, and 3D visualization capabilities in addition to medical expertise anywhere and anytime around the country. The MISSION-DBS design employs a synergistic fusion of techniques in distributed databases (DDB) and artificial intelligence (Al) for storing, migrating, accessing, and exploring images. The efficient storage and retrieval of voluminous image information is achieved by integrating DDB modeling and Al techniques for image processing while the flexible retrieval mechanisms are accomplished by combining attribute-based and content-based retrievals.

Case-Based Support in a Cooperative Medical Diagnosis Environment

“…For supporting the tasks of collaboration and diagnosis, it is necessary that the images have gone through these information extraction and abstraction stages. 13,14 In fact, the facility to carry this out should be built into the medical image database so that a corresponding case-base is capable of providing decision support through appropriate semantics, inferencing and reasoning results. While PACS is excellent at collating and linking sets of medical images at different modalities and textual data of individual patients for medical diagnosis, we would like to support the provision and integration of the derived information from image processing or analysis tasks and clinical comments.…”

<title>Development of medical image databases</title>

“…The data stored in the database should provide fidelities to support these functions. Many efforts have been made to develop such databases [Chen-Garcia & Yun 1995;Hsu et al 1996]. There e also many issues related to the development.…”