<title>Query and information management support for consultation and conference systems involving medical images</title>

Abstract

The practice, training and research of medical image reading or medical sciences involving medical images often require interactions among individuals for expertise/information exchange, sharing and transfer. Examples include diagnosis, case correlation and resident consultations as well as teaching and research conferences. Recently, computer-based consultation and conference support enabling multimedia interactions and precise spatial references on images has been developed. However, the focus has primarily been on interaction support. More research is needed to develop proper query and information management support for before, during and after computer-aided consultations and conferences that are essential to effective interactions and information dissemination. The information management needs of computer-aided consultations and conferences include storage, retrieval, editing, migration and distribution of case-related information. Query support is expected to handle not only predicate-based retrievals but also content-based and similarity-based retrievals in distributed environments. This paper analyzes the requirements of query and information management support for computer-aided consultation and conference systems and presents the design of query and information management functions for before-, during- and after-consultation/conference. The user interface of a computer-aided consultation and conference system along with the architecture of the backend information management system are described. The paper concludes with the implementation status and future directions of this study.© (1995) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.