Information integration and management for computer assisted orthopaedic surgery over Internet

摘要

Because the CAOS is still a relative new technique, it is very important to make the knowledge of experienced surgeons available to the communities of other surgeons. A medical database called "Virtual Observatory" (VO) is developed to integrate, manage and disseminate the information about successful applications of CAOS technique. The XML (Extensible Markup Language) and DTD (Document Type Definition) were used to enable the multi-centric case information submission. The VO database provides also an interface to output the case information in HTML files so that the remote users can access the VO database through Internet with the common browsers (Fig 1.). A VOEU-DTD was defined to standardize the contents to be stored in the database. The XML file is generated according to the DTD and serves as a repository to describe the CAOS cases in a structured way. After the XML file being validated by DTD, the case information will be added into the database with the help of an XML reader which establishes a mapping between the XML file and the data model of the database.