The Design of Formatted Report Language and its Applications in Medical Information Systems

The extensible markup language (XML) is gaining attention in medicine because of its flexibility. Since most XML documents convey information only on content, it has been difficult for medical applications to present and edit them in the precise format, as required in many clinical circumstances. This article offers a design of formatted report (FR) language to meet almost all medical-oriented requirements of presenting and editing data items such as text, image, scheme and video in the precise format. As FR language could be converted to and from other XML-based languages, it´s suitable for almost all XML application environments. A set of components and tools have also been built to promote the application of FR language in the medical fields. These components and tools have established a development platform and could cover almost all application fields of XML. The FR language together with the set of components and tools has already been used in image diagnostic system to present and edit image report in the clinical environment