A hospital integrated framework for multimodality image base management

The trend in healthcare information technology is increasingly digital and multimedia oriented. The next generation of health care information systems will consist of a vast network of heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed imaging scanners, databases, information systems, knowledge intensive applications, and large quantities of multimedia medical data. A key challenge facing system researchers and builders is to provide a new organizational framework that can integrate this varied collection of resources into what appears to be a uniform and logical conglomeration of data and knowledge store in order to increase the availability of global or previously nonaccessible information and to address demanding new information processing requirements for diverse image-assisted medical applications. The purpose of this paper is to present the authors´ research toward the development of a hospital integrated framework of multimodality image base management (MIBM) for digital radiology of the future. This evolutionary framework consists of three hierarchical components: a hospital-integrated picture archiving and communication system (HI-PACS), a medical image database system (MIDS), and a set of image-based medical applications that relies on the support of MIDS and PACS. In this paper, the authors describe the system architecture, guiding principles, and design specifications of HI-PACS and MIDS and illustrate their functions and capabilities with three implemented applications, namely, patient folder workflow, distributed object management, and multimodality imaging studies. In addition, the authors conclude their findings with a summary of challenges and research directions