Query and information management support for consultation and conference systems involving medical images

摘要

Abstract: The practice, training and research of medical imagereading or medical sciences involving medical imagesoften require interactions among individuals forexpertise/information exchange, sharing and transfer.Examples include diagnosis, case correlation andresident consultations as well as teaching and researchconferences. Recently, computer-based consultation andconference support enabling multimedia interactions andprecise spatial references on images has beendeveloped. However, the focus has primarily been oninteraction support. More research is needed to developproper query and information management support forbefore, during and after computer-aided consultationsand conferences that are essential to effectiveinteractions and information dissemination. Theinformation management needs of computer-aidedconsultations and conferences include storage,retrieval, editing, migration and distribution ofcase-related information. Query support is expected tohandle not only predicate-based retrievals but alsocontent-based and similarity-based retrievals indistributed environments. This paper analyzes therequirements of query and information managementsupport for computer-aided consultation and conferencesystems and presents the design of query andinformation management functions for before-, during-and after-consultation/conference. The user interfaceof a computer-aided consultation and conference systemalong with the architecture of the backend informationmanagement system are described. The paper concludeswith the implementation status and future directions ofthis study. !14